Google “Games” with Words: Spell Up

An Evil Invitation

I really like a lot of what Google is doing. Really. Cars without pedals, glasses except for people who need them… Okay, fine: much of my online presence is Googlish.

One of their pastimes has been games. There was a great physics game where the object was to make intricate Rube Goldberg machines out of flippers, bouncers and other pinball-esque pieces.

I’m not sure what they learned about me from that game, but I’m pretty sure that Spell Up has a couple of bonuses for Google aside from the warm fuzzy feeling of helping to cure hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobics of their fear of achieving sesquipedalianhood.

  1. It gets chrome users to allow Chrome to use their microphones. This is big if they want to get people using their voice-command search service.
  2. It gives them a huge sample of people all over the world speaking single letters. A great way to improve their voice recognition algorithms, perhaps even tying them to the player’s account

This second has, for the tinfoil-hatted crowd, the obvious issue of “the microphone will go on and I’ll be spied upon by clean-cut, serious Mormons in Pochatello, Idaho who are determined to keep Amerka safe at all costs.” That’s sort of an issue, I guess, if someone is truly sloppy with where they go on the Internet and how they set up their systems. Which means, about 90% of users.

For me, I see the game as a lost cause, since it’s us polysyllabic aphorism users who will wage war with the game. And give Google a very good vocal profile of people who already know how to spell and have great diction.

 

Cats

Cats head-butt for love

Pull the strokes right out of you

Then leave to hunt mice.

Basically BASIC

A IT SR-52 calculator and it’s magnetic program storage card

The BASIC computer language turned fifty today. It was the second non-human language I learned, after Texas Instrument’s SR-52 programming “language” (read: keystrokes). The last paragraph in the SR-52’s manual said something like: “…If you want to learn more about programming, look for a book on BASIC.”

The visceral thrill I felt when I finished a 4-player Monopoly® game on the SR-52. 3½ hour games were now brisk 45 minute ones. No calculating 10% luxury tax, no shuffling around making change for paying rent. Bing, bang, done.

Boring.

The next thing I learned from programming was that just because something is made easier doesn’t make it better. The stodgy details of the board game turned into a boring set of whizzing shoes, dogs and flatirons. Sure, the game only lasted 45 minutes: but it was devoid of the social interactions.

Now it’s 38 years later and I’m still learning, still exploring. I’m not a perfect programmer, and I’m not a mathematician programmer. I see programming as a kind of poetry: governed by rules as stringent as the iambic pentameter and rhyming forms of a Shakespearean sonnet.

Languages change over time and yet remain the same: BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1, TECO gave way to C++, Java, Ruby, lua, and their ilk. More words, a more complex syntax. The nuanced idea that statements create functions which can endlessly aggregate into larger and still more powerful programs.

Haiku to verse to story to novella to epic. To volumes of functional poetry that powers our social, electronic world.