Interesting Human Behavior

Before you jump to conclusions, I'm not a psychologist, have no training in psychology, I'm just sharing with you an experience that happened to me a few days ago. This has made me thinking of how people act and react in certain circumstances.

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During the lockdown I've started to play a game called Word Domination, a word game available at the Play Store for free. I'm not much of a gamer but this one is different as it's for learning purposes. The plan was to learn words to upgrade my vocabulary but things happened and I'm dedicating almost all my time to creativity. Anyway, whenever I have some free time I'm playing this game.

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It's an interesting game in which you have 7 letters to make words with, plus some tiles on the board that can double and triple the value of the letter that lands on them. You're getting points for each word and the player with the highest score wins. There are also some boosters available, that you can earn by reaching a certain level.

At the beginning I had no idea about these boosters but during the games I had to realize there are plenty and not all based on good intentions. There are boosters that allows you to extend your time limit, others can increase the value of the words, others can replace 3 of your tiles or you can choose an extra tile and so on.

However, one day a player used his booster and instead of getting something for himself, that booster had the power of locking 3 of my tiles for that round. Imagine my surprise. I had no idea that is possible and ended up with 3 tiles less all of a sudden.

Friends or Enemies?

I like to play fair and think this is a mind game that should be about what you know combined with a little bit of luck, so this trick has shocked me. However, there was little I could do, so I did what I could with the remaining 4 tiles and won in the end, surprisingly. I say surprisingly as English is not my first language, it's my third and I'm not very good at it when it comes to vocabulary.

Long story short, this user that locked my tiles sent me a friend request after the game. Surprise, surprise. He wants to be friends after he used that dirty trick during the game and I beat him. It was kind of awkward for me. This was the first friend request by the way, I had no idea that is even possible and so no point in it as you can't really communicate with others except for a few words during the game, like good luck, good game, etc..

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The next day another player used this booster and locked my tiles, I won the game and the user sent me a friend request. Surprise, surprise. Déjà vu. This started to be funny. At that point it looked like those who are using the tile locker are looking for friends and choosing those who they can't beat. Later I found out that you can play with friends and get some extra points for those games, so I guess that's why the friend requests.

Pick The Weak Or The Tough One?

While I'm convinced there was just a coincidence that I was sent a friend request by two players who had the exact same behavior and faith, I was wondering who would I choose to play with if I had a choice.

When playing a normal game here, your opponent is chosen for you randomly by an algorithm I guess. In case you are choosing to play with friends, you're the one who is choosing who to play with, depending on who your friends are.

You have two choices: play with smarter players or with less smart ones? There's a saying in Hungarian, according to which the person with one eye is king among the blind, meaning you're king if you play with less smarter people.

Who Would You Play Against?

Would you play with better players and risk to lose or you'd chose less skilled players and win?