The Hell of It All (51 page)

The gameplay: pick a truck, pick a cargo (Sugar! Electronics! Frozen food! It could be literally any pedestrian item you can think of!), then drive it from one location to another. Along the way, you have to fill up at petrol stations and take the occasional nap. You also have to obey red lights and avoid crashing into things. You don’t get to do any of the other things truck drivers are famous for, like wanking over pornography in lay-bys or murdering attractive 19-year-old hitchhikers, so the tedium quotient remains fairly constant. Most of the time you’re just trundling slowly down a
not-very-interesting motorway. While you’re driving you can look around the cab by sliding the mouse about. That’s quite interesting, and when your eyes alight on the empty passenger seat beside you, it can get downright poignant. The road is lonely and monotonous, and there’s so little to do, you wind up staving off the boredom by holding negotiations with God in your head, just like a real truck driver.

Then you arrive at your destination, at which point there’s an infuriatingly fiddly bit where you have to reverse your trailer into a docking bay. I left the experience feeling slightly more resentful of humankind than when I started, which would indicate that this sort of thing really isn’t aimed at me. The score reflects my personal take on the damn thing. Add 50 points if you really, really want to drive a truck through some dull sections of Europe, like a cunt, with your cuntish hands and your cuntish truck-liking head. Fuck off.

Score: 40%

Don’t kick your own teeth out with excitement or anything, but I’ve been playing Scrabble. Virtual Scrabble. Or ‘Scrabulous’ as it’s known. It’s a plug-in for Facebook: you challenge a friend, then play turn-by-turn; casually, languidly, via email, which means games often last a week or more – like Test match cricket, but faintly more interesting.

And it’s brightened my life considerably – except that there’s a glaring flaw, which is that because (a) you’re not playing in the same room, and (b) you have as much time as necessary to take your turn, it’s subsequently far too easy – and tempting – to cheat.

Cheating comes in two main forms – ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. Soft cheating involves looking stuff up in the dictionary before placing your tiles on the board. Hard to get away with in real life, but not on Scrabulous, where it’s actively encouraged: an interactive dictionary lurks beside the board.

Thus tempted, I became a habitual soft cheater: trying out all my
letters in various combinations, tile-by-tile, desperately hoping I could ‘wish’ a word into existence; preferably one that would let me use up both the X and the J and still hit that treble-word-score square.

How about JOGHEXY? Does that mean anything? Something medical? Please? Well, what about just JOXEY? That sounds like a proper word. Almost. Come on, you bastard dictionary. Throw me a sodding bone here.

(Incidentally, I surely can’t be the first person to have thought of this, but isn’t it time someone released a bogus novelty dictionary containing nothing but made-up, joxey-esque words, with the definition for every entry reading ‘a word commonly used for cheating at Scrabble’?)

Anyway, soft cheating might not be full-blown hard cheating, but it still leaves you feeling rather cheap. Who knew GIVED was a valid word? Not me, until I looked it up. As I slid the final D into position, I felt hollow inside. Numb.

Inevitably, I soon began hard cheating. It started slowly, with an online anagram generator. I could justify this to myself: hell, if I squinted at my letters I could almost make out a proper word – it was just on the tip of my mind, and the anagram software was only giving me a gentle nudge, which isn’t really cheating, right? Besides, a deft Scrabble move is a beautiful thing, and who am I to deprive the world of beauty?

Then I discovered scrabblesolver. co.uk, a site where you simply input the entire layout of the board, and leave it to work out the best possible options. In cheating terms, this was as hard as it gets – so just to keep things plausible, rather than use the No. 1 suggestion (generally a what-the-hell word like OREXIS), I’d scan the list and pick a suggestion I might have conceivably come up with myself. This was now the only genuine skill I was exercising – choosing a plausible lie. But what the heck? I won every time.

But then my opponents started catching up, placing seven-letter bingos, plus plentiful two-and three-letter branching bonus words such as AA and JO – sneaky words only a computer might know.

Then it hit me: they were using Scrabble Solver, too. We’d
rendered ourselves obsolete. It was 100% uncensored computer-on-computer action, with two meat puppets pulling the levers, fooling no one but themselves.

Worst of all, it was hard work. As a game progressed, with evermore-obscure words snaking hither and thither, it took longer each time to input the entire board layout into the Scrabble Solver engine. What had started as a fun diversion had become an arduous job in which I received regular instructions (the layout of the board), inputted them into the system (Scrabble Solver) and then fed the results back into the machine, ready for regurgitation. It was duller than working in a call centre, and I wasn’t even getting paid. I couldn’t even enjoy the dull thrill of a pathetic, ill-gotten, vicarious win any more, because with cheats prospering on every side, the outcome was entirely arbitrary.

Eventually I rebelled. Threw off the yoke of my new robot overlords, stopped cheating and started losing honestly. Not because of some kind of ethical awakening, but because I’d discovered the ultimate truth about cheating: it’s boring. Grindingly boring.

All those famous cheats – Milli Vanilli, the coughing
Who Wants
to be a Millionaire
major, and about 50% of the riders in this year’s Tour de France … they must feel this hollow and despondent all the time. We shouldn’t vilify them: we should pity them.

Anyway, I’m still crap at Scrabble. My one-man mission to redefine ineptitude continues apace. But now at least I’m honest. Or should that be SCRUPULOUS (4H across, 72 points).