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Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal brings us a smart article on overvalued points in games. In short, the issue is that rule changes in games like Scrabble (allowing new words like “qi” and “za”) allow players a new way to exploit the system, throwing it out of balance. Some high-level players argue that when a rule change allows in new high-value type of play (like “za”), the overall scoring system needs to change to account for it, rebalancing the game. Others disagree, seeing the rule change as a simple evolution of the game’s already-complex rules. From Bialik’s piece:
For some — especially opponents — “za” is too cheap and easy. The New Yorker recently published a letter from Matthew Butterick, a Los Angeles lawyer and Scrabble player, bemoaning the preservation of the original tile values as long as the new words are being added. He acknowledges changing the rules might hurt his won-loss record: “I realized that fewer people wanted to play me because I like to use words like ‘xi’ and ‘xu,’ which most casual players consider to be a form of black magic.”
Larry Sherman, who has been ranked as high as 35th by the National Scrabble Association, also would like to see score changes. “X, Q, Z and J were originally assigned high values because of their rarity in our language,” Mr. Sherman says. “Dictionary additions that make it much easier to use these letters contradict the game’s internal logic.”
But his brother Joel, a former champion, responds, “Good players adapt their play to the changes in the dictionary; changing the values only accommodates weak players.”
The argument of those wanting to rebalance the tile scores seems to hinge on an assumption that the original game (in this case, Scrabble) was perfectly balanced — meaning that the letter scores and the allowed word list were somehow in perfect harmony. As a nonprofessional (and indeed, sort of bad) Scrabble player myself, this seems unlikely — the official Scrabble word list (see SOWPODS) is huge, and its relationship with the tile scores is unimaginably complex. Letting in new words undoubtedly changes the balance in some way, but it seems that only the highest-level professional players will ever notice…and haven’t they already benefited from such imbalances throughout the game’s history? Bialik points out that this problem is not isolated to Scrabble:
For amateurs, these are hard points to come by. But as professional kickers have specialized and improved their technique, field goals have become more common. National Football League teams last season made nearly 85% of field goals, compared with barely 60% in 1974, according to Brian Burke of Advanced NFL Stats. There were two successful field goals for every three touchdowns last season, compared with barely two for every five touchdowns in 1974.
Read the article for a nice overview of the issue, including an image showing Alfred Butts’s original letter frequency tabulation.
(Photo courtesy of Flickr user garlandcannon, used under Creative Commons license.)
Comments (10)
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It’s worth noting about the field goals that 1974 was the year of an important change about field goals: the NFL moved the goalposts from the front of the end zone to the back.
This is the second day in a row that ReCaptcha has put 7 1/4 in my text field.
posted by Dave on 3-31-2009 at 3:27 pm
OTOH, the fact that it may not have been “perfectly” balanced before is not an argument for allowing any sort of imbalance.
posted by anomdebus on 3-31-2009 at 4:14 pm
Isn’t this like saying that, since bicycles have improved, the Tour de France should be longer?
posted by Bryan on 3-31-2009 at 5:54 pm
Bryan,
If the Tour de France offered bonuses for unusual events like running over space aliens*, then lots of space aliens start showing up and skewing the game, then yeah its like that.
*I didn’t want to pick on anyone by picking a known group
posted by anomdebus on 3-31-2009 at 6:24 pm
There is an illegal move on the Scrabble board you have pictured. In the top left corner, “OK” has been played, which is not a word according to the Scrabble dictionary.
And I love the look you get when you play a Scrabble “novice” and you play QI, KI or ZA…priceless!
posted by Martin on 3-31-2009 at 7:25 pm
“Ok” is a perfectly legal word. There are a few dictionaries that have it. The Scrabble dictionary is only required for sanctioned tournaments, so there is nothing wrong with the board pictured.
The argument could be pretty much laid to rest by using a standard abridged dictionary. I love the look you get when you play a Scrabble “expert” and ZA gets thrown out, leaving them stuck with the Z when the game is over.
posted by Ted on 4-1-2009 at 12:57 am
I also liken it to other alterations in sports that don’t factor into record keeping. Consider the huge evolution in track shoes, running shoes, baseball/football cleats or basketball shoes over what they were 50 years ago. Or even uniforms! I imagine it’s much easier to move, run and play in today’s baseball uniform vs. the thick, starchy clothes of yesteryear. Even field maintenance has improved, which certainly makes it easier for teams to play effectively. Yet none of these factors, perhaps of small impact each but of grand influence when summed, has changed how records are kept.
Should such changes influence a progression in scoring and how records are measured? Perhaps…but what’s the tipping point when it’s decided that the influences are enough to make such a change? It’s impossible, impractical and inefficient to make such accommodations every time an incremental innovation/change presents itself.
So a sports comparison may be a stretch, but I agree that updates in the rules of strategy/board games should not be a reaction to each incremental change that affects the “field of play”, but instead should come at a point where the rule updates are manageable, easily communicated, and when the number of changes are significant enough to require it.
posted by Qizical on 4-1-2009 at 2:39 am
I’m in agreement with those who say that it changes the balance. The truth is it’s noticeable before you reach the professional/advanced level.
I say this because Scrabble has been a staple in my family’s home, my extended family’s homes, and even in my apartment in college, after I introduced my friends to it.
What I’ve seen is that while it’s much more advantageous to do longer words, new players tend to memorize the two letter words much more than they expand their vocabulary in the three-letters-or-more words, as a safety net. Two letter words give players the option of playing out some of their vowels (which you draw in spades, sometimes) rather than having to reshuffle their tiles. Unfortunately, as I’ve seen my brother and some of my college friends do, they start to play ONLY 2 letter words. As any experienced Scrabble player knows, this turns the game into a 2 letter word battle, because square blocks of tiles tend to prevent longer words from being played. I think this is about the least amount of fun you can have playing Scrabble. By comparison, the most amount of fun you can have playing Scrabble is thumping your opponents head with a seven-letter word like “quitter.”
So while I am opposed to unbalancing Scrabble tile points, I’m more opposed to introducing more two letter words. Most of these words aren’t really words in the sense that they are practical vocabulary, anyways (who the @#$% normally uses “qi” in a sentence?). Two-letter words like “qi” and “za” will also make it harder to make longer words given their letters, so that’s another good counterpoint.
posted by Joel on 4-1-2009 at 9:02 am
Qizical,
A big difference between sports scores and scrabble scores is the scrabble scores are only relevant to match current players. To the best of my knowledge there is not a record book with top scrabble scores.
With sports, all of the current teams/players generally have access to the same technology, so it is still roughly equal for current play, if not historical comparison.
posted by anomdebus on 4-1-2009 at 12:28 pm
Ok, mea culpa, I hadn’t looked deep enough. I first saw a bunch of theoretical records, but apparently some people do keep sanction play records. Still, the effect can be minimized by keeping the aggregate score total of the tiles the same.
posted by anomdebus on 4-1-2009 at 12:37 pm