The Spellers
How Boggle helped me appreciate and understand family
Shick shick shick shick
Rattle rattle rattle
Tap tap tap
A game night, or at least a game, was about to begin in the household. The game in question was Boggle, and the start of every game involved randomizing a set of 16 cubes.
The sound of that shaking rode that aggravating line between pleasant and discordant.
Boggle is a game where 16 randomized letters are placed in a 4x4 grid. Players have the goal of making as many words (at least 4 or more) as possible by using adjacent non-repeating letters with 3 minutes. No points are scored for words you shared with someone else.
Word games are funny things. Spelling games in particular are almost pure knowledge and memory. It’s not about making a connection between concepts or ideas. It’s about knowing what letters pair well with w-i-nand looking for them, over and over again.
This type of knowing is not the type of knowing I have ever been good at. I am good at (or at least I enjoy) making connections between ideas, or trying to play the challenge of uncertainty. This, for example, is why I love Fibble but am resoundingly meh about Wordle. I do not love games about knowing. I love games about finding.
And this is why by the end of the three minute timer there would be a single 7 letter word that no one else had found, ten or so other words and a shockingly small score compared to the word fiends in our family: my sister and father.
My sister and dad are knowers. They are very very good at collecting a bunch of facts and then knowing what to do with those facts once they’ve collected them. And as a result, they enjoy the types of games that reward that ability to know and the ability to focus and concentrate and use that knowledge efficiently.
Growing up this was a challenge. A challenge that I did not fully understand. I perceived a lot of confusion and sometimes frustration on their part1. How this disorganized brain in front of them found a word they could not but failed to find all of the other words that were there. I think they always saw me as a wayward and undisciplined genius. Someone who could never seem to put it together. But that was me.
And for my part I would always marvel at their ability to be so precise. The same precision that eluded me in basically every other area of my life also eluded me here. I had the same creative impulse to make art that the rest of my family seems to thrive at but never the knowing, the precision to follow through and make it happen. Whether it was crafting sentences, printmaking, or any of the other myriad projects we would take on.
It’s why, playing Boggle my brain would spend all of this time straining to find that seven letter connection. While they were confidently, precisely moving along their knowledge trees:
w-i-n
w-i-n-d
w-i-n-d-s
t-w-i-n
t-w-i-n-s
Playing the game was fun but scoring the game was absolutely brutal for my ego. The spark of discovery would quickly get torn to shreds as the remainder of my words were calmly picked off by one of them while their reams of words were waiting in the wings to pick up points.
This might sound absurd but games like that were one of the few areas where there was a level playing field for me. I think on some level it was about trying to prove that I could be as smart as they were. There was no world where I was stacking up when it came to artistic pursuits or my writing skills. Some bad combination of youngest child syndrome and probably undiagnosed ADHD meant there were few avenues that I could succeed in a way that was comparatively interesting.
And the one skill I do have, the one I got from my grandfather, is my ability to throw myself at a problem (happily) over and over again until I win. And that’s part of why I enjoyed and have fond memories of games like Boggle. Even if I never really had the comprehensive knowledge, I could throw myself enough at the problem to make it enjoyable.
Looking back on Boggle from a design perspective, it’s funny to compare it to “modern” games that just have fewer rough edges from a player experience perspective. There’s Wordle and Bananagrams, that are really games about being personally expressive with letters put in front of you, and not very much about interacting with other people. Or there are games like Paperback (competitive) or Letter Jam (cooperative) that are more about the other mechanics built around the words, and not so much about the words themselves.
All of these games are, in one way or another built to lessen those stings of defeat. To make each individual game more about a personal striving and less about comparison. They abstract away those sorts of differences and make them less transparent. Those games, if we’d played them at all, probably would’ve protected my feelings at the end, or at least made them less transparent. But I think the connections and comparisons were important. The challenges were present throughout my life but playing games was a place where those differences could be understood and appreciated.
But word games weren’t all we played. There were also the card games. And next time, I’m going to talk about those!
They would contend this fact. In fact I can imagine them reading this and thinking “wait wait wait Stu is telling a tall tale”. But I am truly, not a knower, I am a connector. I am very very very, horribly bad at the sort of comprehensive and precise knowledge building that they are. The facts stuffed into my head my spread a semi-absurd breadth.