![]() ![]() Spelling Bee is not about self-improvement – you are not spending your time tending to a garden that will produce cheering flowers or healthy courgettes. Sometimes that can feel brutal: if you’re in one of those listless lockdown moods, you can feel like a real loser if you get stuck on 'nice'. It doesn’t give you extra points if you’ve had a bad day. Spelling Bee doesn’t care about the pandemic. 'I can’t sleep until I at least hit "genius".' 'I love doing it before bed: it’s soothing even though I never reach Queen Bee,' she says. ![]() Rachel Syme, the New Yorker writer, tells me it is part of her night-time routine. Instead, I have angrily shouted, 'Gurnard is definitely a word, IT IS 100% A WORD, it is a type of fish, my God, Spelling Bee' when all alone in my living room. It is possible to actually take up grievances via a designated email address, although I have never done this, deeming it just too nerdy and obsessive. They complain that certain words aren’t recognised: why is “turd” not considered a word, they demand to know. ![]() On Twitter (the only other app that sucks more time from me than Spelling Bee), its proponents boast of having reached 'genius' or even the secret level 'Queen Bee' (when you find every single possible word). This is a puzzle that has reeled in the brightest, the best and the nerdiest among us, from the New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum to the author Nilanjana Roy. (The spokeswoman tells me that there are 600,000 subscribers to the New York Times Crossword subscription but won’t say how many regularly play Spelling Bee.) Once you become a Spelling Bee fan, you notice your fellow aficionados everywhere (well, mainly on Twitter). A New York Times spokeswoman says that a 'good chunk of our solvers access the game 4+ times a day' I would say I do double that.Īs soon as I started to spend up to an hour a day playing the game, I began to notice how many others were similarly hooked. According to my phone’s Screen Time data, I now spend more time on Spelling Bee than on Whatsapp, Instagram or any news or lifestyle site. The puzzle updates at 8am British summertime so if I haven’t yet achieved 'genius', I can have one last shot at it, before a new challenge is presented before me. Now, before I have coffee, before I check my email, before I look at the news, I visit Spelling Bee. Spelling Bee, available in The New York Times games hub since May 2018, does all the boring stuff for you, allowing you to enter a Zen-like state of word-finding. There are versions of Spelling Bee available in most newspapers and puzzle magazines – but writing out the answers by hand slows down the game and totting up your score and declaring yourself a 'genius' (because you have reached the required score) is just not as satisfying. Extra points are awarded if you create a “pangram”, which uses all seven letters. You are awarded points for each word you create – and the longer the word, the more points you get. Spelling Bee is a game in which you must find as many words as possible, from the seven letters provided, using the central letter in each. The positive affirmations were dopamine hits in a world that had been sucked of joy. That is the landscape in which I became hopelessly addicted to a little word game that told me my progress was 'solid', then 'nice', then 'great', then 'amazing', then 'genius'. There was a cessation in sarcasm and gossip and all that fun stuff online, as everyone scrolled through the unthinkably bad news. Instagram was just a parade of screenshots of people doing quizzes on Zoom and Twitter was where you kept up-to-date about the coronavirus pandemic. There was very little to do – even on your phone. It was bleak, that week in early April – scary and sad. I started playing Spelling Bee around the time Boris Johnson was hospitalised with coronavirus. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |