Community and Games - Am I Nutz?

I downloaded an iPhone game a few months ago called Nutz, created locally by Chaotic Moon Studio.

The truth is, I download lots of games, but I don’t really play them; I generally don’t have time.

But I gave this one a shot, and I got hooked.  I’m now the worldwide high score leader by a large amount.  What does this say about me, having the high score on Nutz.  There’s not enough room on this server for that blog, so I’ll leave that topic alone.

There was another high score person in second place named Pizza4All.  Perhaps it’s Nutz to admit this, but I made up stories for this person.  He was male, worked during the day, off on weekends.  He was competitive like me, trying to catch up.  Someone suggested perhaps he was just trying to keep ahead of #3, but I insisted in my head, it was all about competing against me.

I learned a few things about myself playing this game.  I wasn’t just surprised at my overtly competitive nature.  I was also surprised at my insistence on keeping an adequate amount of high score distance between us.  I didn’t want him to catch up.  I don’t like suspense, and I didn’t want to go neck and neck.

I learned a little about being present, too.  I don’t like to sit still; I could never meditate.  The whole concept of being present now, living in the moment, alludes me for the most part; I’m always scanning the environment for the future or analyzing the past.  But to win at the game, being present is what I have to do.  It’s a memory game.  You have to remember what’s under the little bags and match the nuts, two at a time.  If I pay attention to what’s going on in my life while I’m playing the game, my score suffers.  A nice lesson in the reward of being right there.

And then I learned a little something about community, connection.  An unexpected lesson.  I should preface what I noticed by admitting I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about online community and connection.  Sure, part of it is because this is my job, my business.  But my obsession and fascination with the topic goes far beyond any job responsibilities I have.  The subtleties that no one admits are the ones I look at the most.

Last week, pizza4all stopped playing.  He didn’t just stop playing, he deleted his high score; he’s completely gone.  And I was devastated.  The game became lonely, empty in a way because I wasn’t ‘playing’ with someone anymore.  When I play now, obsessively opening and matching the nuts, I feel a sense of loss for someone I didn’t know, and confusion about where he went, why he went to the extreme of deleting himself.

Sure, I made up a new story for what happened there, too.  He couldn’t handle the competition, he got a new phone and lost all his settings, etc.  But there’s no way for me to find out because we weren’t able to ‘talk’ during the game.  We could submit our scores, and we could pretend we were part of a community, but the missing piece was being able to create our own conversation.  Instead, we were forced to play the game’s game.  We were limited to the conversation the game allowed us to have.

I was interested enough to try to find him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.  Perhaps I did? I don’t know.  But the main point here is that I felt forced to look elsewhere for the means to connect, the way to answer my questions.

This past week, my son and his girlfriend got me hooked on a new game.  Words With Friends.  It’s scrabble.  You can play it with people you know, or you can ask for a random opponent.  It’s a quick play.  They don’t have to be there at the same time, so you can play whenever your time permits. There’s a chat window, too, where you can leave a message for the person you’re playing against.  It’s easy to use, and I’ve connected with several people.  The chat becomes a one-on-one Twitter-like experience, leaving short messages; only you’ve already got something built in to talk about - this game.

Here’s the interesting part for me, though.  It’s not about the words for me. It’s not really even about the competition like it is on the Nutz game.  Instead, it’s about the community, the connection.  When I see who’s played, and I go to take my turn, I always choose the people I know first.  And then…I choose the people I’ve chatted with next, the people I was able to create conversation with.

So you tell me, am I Nutz? Or is it really all about sharing Words With Friends?