Here’s Scrabble’s dirty little secret: the game is really about maximizing points and space to yield the highest return. Someone who has memorized all the acceptable two-letter words in the formalized dictionary will do much better than someone who knows how to use ‘paletot’ in a sentence. You can forget about neologisms like “eponysterical” or archaic remnants found only in the OED. Scrabble rewards efficiency, memorization and fortune, while remaining ambivalent to creativity, imagination and verve. Maximize property value, minimize artistic expression.
It’s about capitalism, basically.
– Michael Stewart, “Scrabble’s dirty secret”, rabble.ca
Mirrored from Under the Beret.
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Comments
Me: WTF? I played that as a JOKE. I never expected the game to TAKE IT.
Opponant: Yeah, that should be three words. And French. And it still won't accept "pogo."
Me: Go home, Scrabble. You are drunk.
The efficiency is something else altogether.
I have always, personally, resisted efficiency and most likely because I saw it as a characteristic of the mercantile or business class. Being older and wanting a bit more concrete success (money) I've gotten friendlier with the concept. Creativity can be aided and abetted by efficiency after all. As for memorization all those elements can come into play as a writer certainly, I have a great memory for conversations and this certainly helped with the memoir. How I put the elements of those memory fragments together is where the creative elements were unleashed.