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Another advantage for a high-level player like Jack is that he gets to show off his intellect with the woman he's flirting with in a way that a regular chat room wouldn't necessarily allow. An expansive vocabulary is to a Scrabulous player what a smooth baritone is to Marvin Gaye. "For women, it's all about creative intelligence," says Annie, while laying down "garment" for eighteen points. She's not interested in playing against Neanderthals "who write dumb things like 'I want to play women who are double-Ds only.' This is about intelligence." Just as it has been since Cyrano wooed Roxane with his silver-tongued prose.
For Shaina, Scrabulous is about being able to flirt in a location that's wholesome blandness feels safe and comfortable. She started using the game to talk with men after her recent breakup. "I'm just back into the single life after two years, and I don't even know where to start," she says. "I am shy in real life, for the most part. But people on here are just flirtable. I'm too shy to talk to them in person, so I talk to them here." After a couple bad experiences meeting online dates in real life, she decided that Scrabulous was a better scene for her than personal ads because there's no expectation it will lead to a face-to-face meeting.
But though its bland exterior may give it the appearance of a safe zone, Scrabulous doesn't act as a barrier against more vulgar tête-à-têtes. There are two types of Scrabulous come-ons: the fizzy, giggly, coquettish flirtations Jack, Annie and Shaina are talking about, and the kind Alicia (who becomes so horny she has to touch herself) is talking about.
His open table solicited "bi married men" to challenge him to a game, and in response to my request for an interview, he'd only persistently ask, "How big is your cock?"
And the kind that Barry is seeking. His open table solicited "bi married men" to challenge him to a game, and in response to my request for an interview, he'd only persistently ask, "How big is your cock?" He continued to press me for details about my personal dimensions and what I might like to do with him if we were in the same room, even while continuing the game at hand, laying down words like "thermal" and "bisque."
Which raises the point: during all this chatting, there's often a legitimate (and by its very nature, dry) Scrabble game in progress. Sometimes, as Jack pointed out, the game falls by the wayside entirely as the come-ons intensify. But many times it doesn't. During my heatedly flirtatious game with Alicia — during which she told me that she likes to "touch [her] tits, get wet, save the mental image for later" — she threw up over two hundred points, including several high-value words like "ravers" (twenty-seven) and "pom" (twenty-one). Perhaps the competitive energy generated by a game of Scrabulous enhances a certain kind of flirting, an eroticism fostered by an increasingly passionate rivalry.
My game with Alicia ended several days after we'd begun it. In the beginning, it had heated up quickly, producing a conversation transcript neither one of us would want our significant others to ever lay eyes on. But as the game dragged on through the work week, we found ourselves settling into a more polite rhythm, bantering mainly in practicalities and light teasing. Things cooled with time, as is apt to happen with any couple. But that didn't make the experience less pleasurable. When all was said and done, the score stood at 257 to 233. She'd beaten me, but it was close, so we figured we were a pretty good match, and decided to play each other again sometime. n°
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Will Doig writes for all sorts of fabulous and exciting magazines. He was raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Today he lives in Brooklyn.
