WHAT'S THE OBSESSION WITH FARMVILLE?

Maybe I am not one to judge, given I have never played it but I am seriously beginning to wonder about the kids' current obsession with Farmville on Facebook. At Hogmanay I had arranged to take them to their aunt and uncle overnight with all-night partying and the works. Already a sleepover there is their favourite thing so a New Year one is fun with bells (no pun intended) on.
Are you ready Marcel? I asked around 7pm. He looked vaguely panicked and exclaimed... But I have sixty-seven poinsettias to harvest at 10pm... oh, do you think Derek will lend me his computer for ten minutes?
Sixty-seven poinsettias???? You are a 12 year old boy, you shouldn't even know what a poinsettia is!
Then tonight, Charlotte burst in on me in the bath.
I've done something really stupid! she announced. Oh dear... What? I wondered... but before I could ask, she too was worrying herself silly that she had planted a batch of two-day crops at 3-10pm on Saturday and could I bring a charged laptop to the school gate tomorrow at 3pm when I pick her up and she'll try to run out by 3-09pm to harvest them.
Have they lost their marbles?

GUITAR HERO

Marcel and Charlotte have been saving up for an XBOX for months and Thomas and I gave them the last £70 towards it for their Xmas. By the time I had crawled out of my sickbed late Xmas afternoon, the new XBOX was already connected and they were all playing Lego Indiana Jones. Because we'd been sick, we'd missed the family get together. Derek and Amanda must have felt sorry for us because they volunteered to throw together a curry on Boxing Day, should we be feeling up to it. We went over for 6ish and Marcel had a look through Derek's XBOX games. He discovered Guitar Hero and a World tour began. He and Derek played guitar like a pair of kids most of the night. No one was spared a turn. Come midnight Lots and Marcel decided to invite themselves to stay the night and I left with 2 passengers fewer. Saturday of course saw Marcel empty his bank account and buy the blasted noisy game for our house and I was then subjected to half a dozen very noisy songs over and over as he perfected playing them. You choose your level - beginner, easy, medium, hard, expert - there may be a few more. Depending on level you play more and more notes and strum more, gaining points for hitting the notes on time. It looks easy so I had a go, first on easy but when I was booed off on that I tried beginner where you strum but don't play any notes at all - even that was so difficult I only scored 70%. I was left wondering what possible pleasure kids such as Marcel and my brother could possibly get out of this annoying, noisy game!

IT'S TIME TO BAN THE BOOK

We started playing Scrabble once or twice a month with the bigger kids in the hope it'd help their spelling and vocabulary. I know many of my workmates will die of shock at the thought of a colleague actually playing Scrabble for pleasure (because we publish all the UK Scrabble titles many of our colleagues would feel an hour spent on anything to do with Scrabble was overtime and would feel they'd deserve to be paid for the purpose!) Anyway, the games were going well but there were two main problems when playing with an 8 year old and (as was then) a 10 year old, and that was that finding many words with the X, J, Z or Q was hard work, and that the last two or three rounds when you were down to two or three letters were equally impossible. Thomas came up with the idea of getting the three Scrabble books from the office bookshop: Scrabble words Scrabble lists Need to know? Scrabble Great, we now had a source of two and three letter words. We had lists of all the words beginning with the obscure letters and we had hints at what could be done with many letter combinations. But surprisingly, although the kids are enjoying the game more than ever, given their newfound ability to win with really obscure words, I have gone from relishing our games from an educational perspective, to finding them utterly pointless, or borderline pointless anyway. The kids are using their dictionary skills at least to find new and weird words, but given the Scrabble words book has no definitions, this is simply a means to winning and no longer educational. Tonight the kids came up with bowat, jape, mugg, zelants and qat - all great words but they haven't a clue what any of them mean! As a dictionary writer of 18 years experience I tend to think if even I don't recognize a word, then the kids shouldn't be using it to beat me at Scrabble. We have completely lost focus of why we started to play the game in the first place. It also opened my eyes to the Scrabble nuts out there. They play to win, not to learn anything. In fact winning is so important, they would be happy to play Scrabble in a language they don't speak rather than lose a game... incomprehensible. I guess they are a different breed of weirdo nerd from me.

SCRABBLE

scrabble
Originally uploaded by petitshoo

Have you ever tried playing scrabble using a foreign scrabble set? You'd think it'd be as simple as removing the odd character we don't use in English but it is more fun than that.
Thomas, Lots and Marcel just completed a game of Scrabble in English using a Danish set. We removed the ÅÆØ but the problem was the ratios of the remaining tiles. At first we rubbed our hands together in glee when we noticed the letter C gave you 8 points. C is very rare in Danish but in English it is the 2nd largest starting letter in an English dictionary (I've written enough of them to know - yeah I know that's sad). But of course that means there are only 2 or 3 in the box and yet you need them in every other English word. Likewise, you suddenly find yourself with dozens of Ks and Vs, you can't place. Despite that Marcel managed to score 170, just beating Thomas and even Lots managed 133.