Emotional Scrabble

Playing 'P-U-M-P-K-I-N' on Thanksgiving Day

I love the idea behind Scrabble; little tiles, each with a letter, that one combines on the board into words.  But what about the scoring; is it as perfect as the game's components?

Here, I'm not questioning whether a 'Y' should in fact be a 4-pointer, while a 'U' is a mere 1-pointer.  No, I'm talking about the quality of play.  

Sometimes a player will get rid of a 'V' by making a word like 'van' and another player might then grunt out 'un huh'; so, no big deal.  But other times, if someone looks at her seven tiles, thinks for a minute or two, and comes up with something that's so appropriate for the occasion that everyone playing is astonished, one hears "wow", "fantastic", "way to go"; like making 'H-A-P-P-Y' on someone's birthday.  Shouldn't there be a reward for that kind of genius?

Tinkering with Scrabble is common; there are oodles of variants that people have come up with that are easily googled.  The obvious change, to diminish some of the frustration in the game, is to set up 3-4 face-down tiles off to the side of the board that any player can access, prior to taking a turn.  Just trade a tile on your rack for a face-down tile in what could be called the 'boneyard'.  So, if you've got three 'I's or two 'U's, trade one in and see what you get; then make your move.

Taking another step into the alternative Scrabble universe, software could be developed that combs through millions of created words (those found on Facebook's Words-With-Friends or Scrabble, for example) and ranks these by rarity, by how many letters in the word, and by how easy a word is to create.  So, words like "red" or "at" wouldn't earn any points, while something like "blue", "afar" or "religion" would earn quite a bit.

Of course to actually align scoring with the quality of a given word one would also have to know the date, the life circumstances for each player, and the news of the day.  And that can only be done by those playing the game, unless..., sometime in the future, our devices know us better than they do at present.

If players are asked to somehow reward each other's words, the problem is, obviously, that points are being given to one's opponent.  So how to make it work?  One way might be for players to guess what value their opponent will assign.  I'll work on this and add an update sometime next year.

Update 1/26/20: Well, nearly four years later and here's one idea:  As mentioned above, the player creating a word secretly guesses one number of bonus points, while opponents guess another.  
  *If the scoring player guesses the same number as the opponent, s/he receives that number of extra points (no guesses of '0' allowed). 
  *If an opponent's guess is one more or less than the scorer, s/he gains a point (no guesses of '0' allowed).
  *If an opponent's guess is more than three points greater than the scoring player, the scorer gains a point.

Unbundling Pay TV -- An Exercise in Game Design

Progressivism Comes To TV Bills

I looked at my satellite TV bill recently and was surprised to see it had climbed another few rungs on its way to $100-a-month.

Like everyone else who pays for TV (cable or satellite), I'm essentially offered three or four levels of programming, with the cheapest not including one particularly watched channel and the most expensive shoveling every last unwatchable offering at me.

Lately, there's been talk in Congress of forcing pay TV to offer customers a la carte programming where consumers pick and pay for only those channels they watch.  This has seemed like a sensible change to most, until they hear about the consequences.  Only a few sadsacks would pay for channels like the Home Shopping Network, for example, meaning less revenue for channel bundlers and so, higher rates.  In other words, we'd likely lose the smaller, less mainstream channels and end up paying about the same price, but for less content.

So, why is this an exercise in game design?  Because both sides to the question assume it's either / or; that there's no middle ground.

And yet additional alternatives are possible.  For example, if subscribers were offered either 3/6/9/12, 15 or 'all', channels of their choosing, let's say, and at those levels cable / satellite companies were able to add in, say, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 channels of their choosing (essentially, these extras would be "Look at what you're missing."), everyone would get most of what they wanted.

Most importantly, consumers would feel like they were picking and choosing.

Perhaps just as important, the basic rate for picking just three channels would likely be lower than it is now for a basic package.  This would be a great boon for families that can't afford to pay for more.

And the cable and satellite companies would be able to offer channel companies they bargain with access to what would become the much desired 10, 20, 30... temporary, free slots.  These would then be juggled periodically, giving providers bargaining chips.

Ideally, a bite would be taken out of corporate profits, while those who can afford all the channels would pay more and those who are economizing would pay less.

Update: A contrarian take from the Atlantic