One of our lads is laid up at the moment. Major operation. Crutches for months. So the other day I sat with him while he played a computer game, Lies of P. He was near the end. The boss fight, as it’s called: a ferocious swirl of jumps, spins, slashes, moves, blocks, counter-moves, so fast, so complex. I checked to make sure he wasn’t just pushing all the controls at once, because that’s what I would have done, but no. There was a method.
This game was different, he explained, because the boss character was much stronger and you were almost certainly going to lose. In other games, that experience built your strength and agility until, eventually, you overcame. In Lies of P, you just went back to where you were before. Weak, outmatched, outmanoeuvred. You had to learn the boss’s moves, and even some new ones. And eventually you might win. This was about his tenth attempt, he reckoned. It took about 20. And the game is South Korean, of course. It is designers from that part of the world that really get off on epic tests of patience and resolve.
To me, it just looked daunting. I can remember playing The Legend of Zelda when the kids were little, and it took me about an hour to exit the first room, because I didn’t understand the logic of gaming, the clues and hidden doors so obvious to any seven-year-old. Fighting that boss would consume what remains of my life.
On the tiles
So what I’m saying is, Scrabble, I get it. The latest sign of the apocalypse, apparently, is that Scrabble boards will now have a simpler, easier version of the game on one side.
On the reverse will sit the Scrabble we all know, that has stood the test of family time for 75 years. But this new version is for Generation Z — ten points right there, by the way — who are less competitive and find word games intimidating. Instead there are tasks.
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“Make a blank,” reads one card, with an S and a space beside. So? Is that the limit of our ambition these days? Stick an O next to an S? Let’s face it, the target audience isn’t going to know si, the tetravalent non-metallic element, next to oxygen the most abundant in the earth’s crust. And anyone who does, really should turn the board over.
But then I thought: what’s the difference? If a person’s not wordy, or is surrounded by people who are, a game of Scrabble will feel as overwhelming as that boss fight looked to me. And the problem-solving that occurs in open world gaming may one day prove more useful than knowing you can also get out of trouble on a Scrabble board with the onomatopoeia sh.
Anyway, every family plays its own Scrabble rules. You can have “bits of words”? What the hell is that?
Pub grudge
And then there are general knowledge games. I love them, and pub quizzes too. When I lived in Manchester, I’d regularly go north to play as a ringer for the Cemetery B team at a league in Blackburn. The bloke who ran it was a proper grifter. The B team was actually the Cemetery’s strongest team, but he wanted to lull the opposition into a false sense of security. You might say he was hardcore.
One evening we had a grudge match. Top two in the Thwaites league. Last question of the night to our rivals, two points up for grabs, us leading by one. The bloke answering looked like Andy Capp. Barely got one right all night. “What is the literal translation of the word kamikaze?” It’s in the bag, lads. Andy Capp’s never nailing this. He took his roll-up out momentarily. “On the divine wind.” It is, you know.
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Still, quizzes aren’t for everybody. We had house guests once, back when Trivial Pursuit was a big thing. One of the group didn’t want to play because she claimed she didn’t know anything, and was only good at RE at school. I said that was fine, because I came from a long line of godless heathens and know next to nothing about the Bible. We’d make a good team.
Eventually our moment came. “What is the sixth commandment?” was the question. I turned to my partner. She thought about it a while. “Well, it’s got to be one of 12,” she said.
