On Playing, Competing & Internet Friends
Turns out celebrities need to play with people too
I heard a guy tell a story the other day about a years-long relationship he’d had with a celebrity.
They’d kept a running series of Words With Friends games going back and forth for a little more than three years. They never spoke: no chit chat or commentary, never a hello, nothing. They interacted with each other for roughly one third of a decade, consistently, repeatedly, a long-lasting interpersonal mode of relating to one another – full of words, yet lacking conversation.
Then one day, without notice (obviously), they just stopped.
Not the “Relationship” you were expecting? Welcome to the 21st Century1.
The Celebrity had posted his Words With Friends username on an Instagram Story. It was the pandemic. Shit was weird. Our guy saw the Story, said “why not?” and that led to a relationship that we do not have terms to properly categorize.
They were “Internet Friends” – but not really. Because they never spoke…except through letters on a scrabble board, literal words lacking any literal meaning2.
Were they friends? Acquaintances? Our Storyteller seemed to have only positive things to say about the situation – to be honest, it seemed like he hadn’t thought much about it out loud before – but they never acknowledged each other’s presence except through repeatedly requesting a rematch.
So, here we have what seems to be a completely novel interaction, an objective use of language for something other than communication: Words for the sake of points, value, winning.
In one light, we could view this as sheer competition. Strip back the interpersonal – it was almost as if they were playing the computer – and what’s left but the cold impulse to conquer?
Except it wasn’t against the computer. It’s called “Words with FRIENDS,” dammit! And that other faceless, wordless person somewhere on the other end of the internet does make a difference.3
Because they weren’t just competing: they were playing.
They were playing a game together, as a matter of fact, entertaining each other. They were each working towards a specific result, intent on winning, sure, but the score didn’t really matter. They just wanted a good match, to enjoy the act itself no matter the outcome.
And while their only interest in one another was to consistently seek to best the other, there existed no sense of animosity: no cursing or rage quitting or whatever other awful stuff tends to happen on chat boards or Fortnite games.
As a once-hyper-competitive dude who grew up playing sports in the ‘90s, it took a lot of hard work (and therapy) to find a way to play a game – any game – without pissing off my opponents. We were raised on Social Darwinism, dog-eat-dog, zero-sum markets. “You play to win the game!”
And look where that’s gotten us.4
The easiest way to break this spell, of course, is to just stop caring. A more common one on the global scale seems to be, “denigrate and dehumanize your opponent mercilessly.”
Neither seem great.
We need to care sometimes, to find ways to attach to what we’re doing without clinging too deeply to its outcome. We need to play for the sake of playing.
And so, here we are. Thanks to the very same globalizing mechanism that has entered all of us into a constant state of intercontinental competition – for attention, for resources, for peace, and even peace of mind – the internet has given us “Words With Friends Friends.”
Aka “Fellow Human Beings.”
You see, we’re already doing it. We’ve already figured out how to exist with people from all over the world who we are inherently in competition with — and still wish them the best.
Sometimes we win; sometimes we lose. All the while we just stay grateful to get to play the game, not alone, but with – and against – someone else.
Perhaps this is what the internet is good for.
I asked our storyteller how it felt to get ghosted. He didn’t have a response.
It’s honestly too meta to even get into, but Wittgenstein could eat his heart out here. Talk about a “Language Game”: we’ve got words completely devoid of meaning forming the basis of a relationship that, in fact, lacks all communication as we know it, aka the sole thing these random strings of letters and sounds exist to accomplish.
I wish I could ask that celebrity how he conceptualizes the random people that play Words with Friends namelessly against him. I wonder if there were a lot of them or just a few. Did he mostly play with, like, his aunt and his grandma and sometimes with a friend or two, but he was so into it that sometimes, when they weren’t responding fast enough, he just kept a couple side games going on with some randos? Or did he just want friendly competition with people he knew he would have a good game with? The safest guess is that The Celebrity doesn’t really think much about it. Not because they’re a celebrity or anything, but just because these kinds of things happen all the time now and the world is insane.
Take your pick: a society dominated by billionaires, mass corporate consolidation, the ravaging of our planet’s resources, the current state of politics/the global rise of authoritarianism. Make us play dick swinging contests our whole lives and you’d be shocked to find how many little dicks decide they need to constantly find bigger, better ways to overcompensate.