Some Game Cheaters are Too Obvious

Some time ago I posted an article about cheating at Scrabble.

There is a game on Facebook, (which is why I joined Facebook) in which one can play Scrabble with one or more opponents.  There are  Twenty Four hours to make a move games which are good for those who think.   There are five minutes to move games for those who like their Scrabble quick.

I play the twenty four hours to make a move game because I don’t live on the computer.  I do get up, go out, do other things.

The game gives you a little ‘word test’ box so you can try out a word before placing it.   It’s a nice game.

Now you can ‘cheat’.   Everything on the Internet always has a crack or some kind of app which allows people to cheat.  Okay.  I get that.   I assume that probably people cheat.   But do they have to be so obvious?

More than once I came up against someone who makes an ‘instant’ play of some twistedly hard word, or squeezes the letters into some strange corner.   Something that would take a human a bit of time to figure out.

The quick play is an instant give away someone is using a cheat.   This means that I will not take another move for the next Twenty three hours and fifty six minutes.   And I will inform the other side via the chat.  This usually causes a ‘forfeit’ because cheaters need to win NOW.

I ran into a chap who was about five miles from my home in Jamaica.  We chatted a bit, and he began to cheat. I told him, “You’re cheating. I’m gone.” and logged off.   The next day I returned, took a play and again he did the 3 second retaliation.  So I forfeited and refused to play with him or communicate.

What did he win?   Nothing.  There are no prizes.

He could have cheated and taken at least ten minutes between moves.  I might be fooled.  I might think that he was working out a play.

He could have used one of those ‘find a word’ cheats in which you load in your letters and it spells words, just to see if there’s a seven letter one there, or if you use a ? as a wild card you might find that you can make an eight letter word using a tile already on the board.

You wouldn’t know, for a fact, the person was cheating if that seven or eight letter word didn’t arrive for twenty minutes.   You’d say, wow… and think they sat there with a pencil and paper and did some kind of try to find a word.

But this kind of cheating isn’t as much of a kick to cheaters as the instant play.

A friend of mine, who is totally dyslectic,  who can spell his own name wrong, showed me his cheat.  He had a 100% win rate because he let the computer play for him. He did nothing. He watched.

The opponent would play, the app would instantly fling down letters.  He did nothing.  He could go to the bathroom and return finding he has won.

I am sure that people cheat all the time and get away with it.

Take a writing site.

I am sure someone reads an item written by someone else, copies and pastes it here, then runs around, moving paragraphs, changing words, putting on a new title, and gets over.

After all, if you wrote an item; “The Early Reign of Queen Elizabeth II,” on another site, and someone copied it and posted it under the title, “The Young Queen Elizabeth II”, and  changed the words; i.e.  “Elizabeth never imagined she would be queen,”   to “If her Uncle had not abdicated Elizabeth would not have become Queen”, well, clearly that isn’t plagiarism.

But how many do that?

Most take the item as is/where is and beyond a few verbs, adverbs, adjectives, it is the same.  That is because they are cheaters.

They are unapologetic cheaters.

There is a difference between being inspired by another writer and writing on the same or similar topic; for example, Star Trek/Star Wars/Firefly   three traveling in space stories,  but three different stories.   Not a hint of plagiarism, even at the lowest form.

Compare this to those who copy and paste; not being inspired but stealing.

Why do it?

Sure, if you are writing something factual where the facts can not change, i.e. Queen Elizabeth II biography, you can’t change the dates, the names, anything.  It has to be as it is.  You can take a Wikipedia entry for research but then you write it in your own words with your focus.  You don’t post the Wikipedia entry.

Unless, you want to be caught.