Why engineers beat writers at word games
If you'd like to connect me to an FMRI machine as I play Boggle, then I’m game.
I loved Boggle until I married a civil engineer.
I used to pull out the classic word-search game for activities throughout college. I enjoyed the musical rattling of cubes in the plastic shell. As a writer who strung together thousands of words each week, I took pride in doing fairly well. Even when my friends beat me with an unexpected word, I laughed like a child whose uncle pulls a quarter from behind his ear. How’d you do that?
But that changed when my wife, Becky, beat me at Boggle easily and consistently.
When we were engaged, an engineer friend of mine was in town for work, so we had a game night. I lost Boggle to both engineers.
Later I played against Becky’s sister, a mechanical engineering major who spent a lot of time as a teenager poring over dictionaries to add to her Boggle arsenal. She slaughtered me. Despite what my seventh-grade English teacher had once said about about writers making use of more words than others, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
It’s not my job to make words from letters, but to make meaning from words.
Engineers and writers have different brains
My engineering friends’ dominance at word games puzzled me. Wasn’t I a “word engineer” who spent hours a day reading, researching and writing?
Shouldn’t I bring bigger, better words to the Boggle board than people who spent their days running calculations and designing machines and landfills and roads?
I saved my pride by developing a theory about how my engineering friends just think differently. Here it is:
Engineers are builders at heart. They combine mathematical thinking and mechanical skill. They assemble pieces to make something new.
Writers are artists at heart. We choose words, sentence structures and ideas to express meaning. I revise along the way and again when I’m done. The final result is expressive, not utilitarian.
From this perspective, Boggle is an engineer’s game. It’s not about vocabulary, but about recognizing patterns and building something out of them.
In writing, though, my toolbox has the entire English language, not 16 letters arranged in a grid. It’s not my job to make words from letters, but to make meaning from words.1
Word games use different brain regions than writing: the research
Fortunately, this idea about Boggle being aligned with an engineer’s brain is more than a comforting self-deception.
I’ve never found someone who has tested my hypothesis directly. Attention psychology graduate students: I totally think you should get college students from different majors to play Boggle while strapped in the FMRI machine to measure their brain activity.
But for now, here are a few studies, papers and articles that lend credence to my hypothesis. Note: Most relate to Scrabble instead of Boggle, but I think it applies.2
Scrabble is about memorizing word lists, not using the words in sentences
In one study, researchers in Canada tracked the brain waves of Scrabble experts as they identified whether jumbled letters were actually words.3 It turns out that when judging whether a group of letters was a word, Scrabble experts light up a different part of the brain than other players.
“Scrabble experts made use of brain regions not generally associated with meaning retrieval in visual word recognition, but rather those associated with working memory and visual perception,” the researchers wrote.
In other words, Scrabble champs see a collection of letters (visual perception) and cross-reference their list of memorized words (working memory), and then they can move on.
But me? When I play word games, I might find a word and then find myself thinking about its origin or making a sentence with it. When the time runs out, I have a new novel outlined in my head, but not a lot of words on my Boggle sheet.
Word games are really strategy games
The New York Times columnist Isaac Aronow assumed that being a wordsmith would give them a leg up at Scrabble.4 Not so much. He lost an online version of the game over and over again.
“Many top players don’t know the meanings of many common Scrabble words,” he wrote. “The game becomes far more about strategy than anything else.”
For example, sometimes playing a two-letter word that limits your opponent’s options is better than a long word that sets them up for a Triple Word Score.
Scrabble is like a cross between chess and poker, one expert told Aronow. A surgeon told him that mathematical ability is important, “noting that knowledge of probabilities, knowing the distribution of the remaining tiles in the bag and thinking a few turns ahead are all far more valuable than simply making an aesthetic play with a cool word.”
This English major’s got none of that.
Boggle involves strategy, too. A competitive Boggler with a PhD in Mathematics Education from Columbia University wrote a paper5 as a graduate student that applied theories of mathematical problem-solving to Boggle. It’s more than just scanning the grid for words.
Word games are a competition
These engineer friends also care about competition more than I do. My wife’s family took board games and card games seriously and placed a high priority on competing. Why else would her Boggle-loving sister literally read the dictionary just to train for Boggle?
I, on the other hand, developed a more collaborative approach to games. I love winning, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for it. My favorite games have always been the ones that I enjoy playing even when I lose.
Research out of the Univeristy of Wisconsin—Madison6 found that individuals with high achievement orientation (a desire to do well, excel, even win) enjoyed Boggle more in competitive situations. Someone like me, who is just playing for fun, doesn’t experience the same drive to be the best, so the competition doesn’t stoke me to outperform others.
And that’s where the story takes a tragic turn.
The more I played Boggle against people who could beat me with large margins, the less I enjoyed it. It might be fun to hear someone read off a couple of words that I missed. But seven or eight words I’ve never heard of? Not so much.
As a result, I hardly ever play Boggle anymore.
The good news is that I have started to pick up other games, and I’ve even wrapped my head around strategy in a few. As a result, I’ve enjoyed more games while losing, and that’s a good thing.
I have yet to find a word game where I win consistently—unless you count real life communication as a game. Becky knows not to ask for my advice in Boggle, but she does ask me when she’s trying to decide how to phrase something in an important email or meeting.
Am I right?
My hypothesis is far from proven, but it’s a start.
I think it’s significant that Scrabble players are using their visual perception and working memory to identify words, not the parts of the brain that involve meaning. The role of strategy and mathematical ability lends credence to my idea. And a thirst for competition leads to more enjoyment and success in probably any game.
But there’s a lot to learn, still.
For one, am I unique, or is it common for writers to lose word games to engineers? Are engineers in general better at strategic thinking, or do they generally have higher achievement orientation than wordsmiths? What role do vocabulary size, game preparation, and hours per week spent reading play in the game?
The research that could help us answer these questions would reveal some fascinating things about how our brains approach different tasks in life and how various skills can enhance our performance. It also might help us design a word game that I can win.
So if any psychology student out there in the world thinks it would be fun to hook a bunch of people up to FMRI machines and have them play boggle, please know that I’m game.
UPDATE: This article has been corrected to more accurately identify the author of the the paper about mathematical problem solving in Boggle. And he says he shares my wish for fMRI studies of Boggling.
Engineers agree with this hypothesis. When I joked on Facebook about losing Boggle to engineers, I got these responses:
“Don't fret, it's problem solving we are good at. Never mind the type.”
“Boggle isn't about putting words together in an appealing way; it's about knowing tons and tons of them and knowing the mechanics of word construction. Sounds like engineering to me!”
I’m bad at Scrabble, too.
Problem Solving Strategies in Boggle-Like Games, by Benjamin Dickman.