Robotic Word Game Revenge

A story about Quinn, a quiet developer who became obsessed with beating his girlfriend at a word scramble mobile game.

"We had this guy Quinn who used to work at our company. Most soft-spoken guy, gentle - if there was a fly that landed on his wrist he'd be like 'it's your wrist now fly.' Never said a bad word about anybody.

We started playing these word games in the office and I suggested he play. I could see him getting visibly stressed about it. I asked what's wrong and he says 'No, if I play then I'm just gonna get super obsessed with it, I'm just gonna take it too far.'

He then tells me about this word scramble game - where you have 9 letters on a grid and you're trying to create as many words as you can by dragging your finger across. His girlfriend beat him at it once. So he went to Google's headquarters and programmed an artificial robot arm to make as many swipes as possible per second. He added a little nerf gun tip to it so it could scrape against the screen, then programmed it to move in every direction - the optimal path to create as many words as possible in a minute.

His time became unbelievably higher than everybody else's. His girlfriend's response was 'Well this game's not fun anymore' and he just said 'I happened.'"