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| This is where I met "Wordy123" |
When I first got WWF I was VERY eager to play. Waiting for my friends to send a word back (which ranged from a play every half hour to every 3 or 4 days) was agonizing. I wanted to play. A lot. So I added a few random opponents while I built up my "people I actually know" opponent list. In my first week I had about 25 games going. I was eating my day away one little letter tile at a time. I would wake up and play a game while I walked Bruce. I'd play while I waited for my english muffin to toast. I'd play while I walked from my car to whatever building I was going to. I'd play on my lunch hour. I'd play at happy hour, waiting for dinner to cook, during commercials while watching "Bones", lying in bed right before I would fall asleep. I'd wake up and do it all over again. With an addiction that would rival Betty Ford herself I found that even my random opponents weren't making moves as quickly as I wanted them to, well none of them except for one. I won't put their genderless username on my blog so instead we'll call them "Wordy123".
Wordy123 was just.like.me. in terms of their thirst for tile placing, triple scoring word lust. This user played at all the same times during the day that I did. Our schedules became so synched that I would wake up, turn the alarm off, and see the push notification that Wordy123 had played 38 seconds ago. They had also just woken up. Some nights I would stay awake longer than I intended to because Wordy123 would make moves, and I would make another move. There were even awkward pauses. At 1:03 am, both knowing we had to be up in 5 hours, there would be a subtle break in word sending rhythm while one of us decided on whether or not to call it a night. Sometimes I made the call to stop play for the night. Sometimes they did. We didn't utilize the messaging function of the game. Our relationship was strictly words made with tiles-no messages.
At a certain point I started to feel weirded out by my WWF play with Wordy123. This heavy playing was during a time when I was feeling isolated and disconnected in my relationship. I started to become embittered because Wordy123 was more in sync with my schedule than my girlfriend, who was asleep when I left and plugged in to her computer when I got home. Which was apparently fine with me because I walked around the house with my face and fingers glued to my iPod shooting words back and forth with Wordy123, not leaving much time to talk to her. Like all good neurotics, I eventually over-thought my purely-innocent-albeit-unhealthy Words with Friends relationship into oblivion and one day, after a particularly close and awesome game with Wordy123 had ended, I declined their invitation for a new game. I decided to slow down on WWF and try and spend some quality time with my girlfriend.
And the guilt I felt after I declined the game was surprisingly overwhelming. I thought about using the messaging section to explain myself to Wordy123. To tell them how much I enjoyed playing with them, but that I was letting WWF keep me from being present with my partner. I wanted to thank them for the much needed companionship. And to also check in on them. Because as much as I was playing with them, I imagined that their circumstances were similar to my own. With their face stuck in their phone all day with me, there probably wasn't much communication going on wherever they lived.
I now only play WWF with actual friends, and a good 15 hours to 6 days could pass before I make a play. I have my friends that I play during my morning routine (looking at you Mike and James) and my friends I play late at night (Veronica, that's you!) but I don't have any random opponents anymore. I sometimes search for Wordy123 to see if their username is still active. To see if they are still "alive" on the WWF scene. I never request a game though.
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