The other night I had a dream that I was playing Words With Friends with someone, and he was scoring hundreds of points at a time. His words were just random strings of words that went clear across the board. They contained multiple X,Z,Q combinations. They were longer than any word anyone could possibly come up with.
And it never even occurred to me that he was cheating.
Cheating because he hacked the game, cheating because he was taking advantage of some sort of break in his copy of the game? Who knows. But I didn’t even consider it an option.
In the dream, I told another Words friend about it, and he said “Are you kidding? How do you think he would be doing it? He’s cheating!” Still. It was hard for me to digest that someone would do that. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe it.
Mostly because it’s a game. What does it do for you if you win by cheating? You know you didn’t really win. Does that matter to people who cheat? I’ve always wondered.
Then I wondered what it says about me that I couldn’t admit to myself that someone was cheating even though it was obvious. Total trust. Is that because I knew he wouldn’t do anything wrong or because I was in denial?
There is really not much that is worse than learning you can’t trust someone you care about. Even if they’re just cheating at a game.
Then my friend asked if I could do the same thing. I tried and found that I could.
And I woke up just as I was trying to decide if the rules of the game were now different because the game itself was broken.
Because at that point the question was really what the rules are once there aren’t any rules any more. Are you smart to take advantage of the break in the game or is that unethical?
I was glad I woke up.
That was way too much thinking to do during a dream.