IndieCade East 2015

Pick up almost any word game and you'll find that its model of the English language is based almost entirely on an analysis of the frequency of single letters. It's why Z's are worth more (but are less common) in Scrabble, and why the same words always seem to show up over and over again when you're playing Boggle. In this talk, I argue that while this is an intuitive model, it's ultimately unfun—making word games more about rote memorization than, well, building words. I'll talk about research into the various kinds of knowledge that people bring to bear on the task of putting English words together, and advance some ideas about how this knowledge can be incorporated into games and play. The goal: to encourage designers to make word games that are fun for a wider variety of English speakers—regardless of how much of the Scrabble word list they've memorized.