How I found friendship through online Scrabble

The internet, as we all know, is a place for rage and hate. It’s a free-fire zone in which even something as apparently innocuous as Facebook – original use-case: posting family snaps for your gran – ends up incubating armed insurrection and spreading 5G conspiracy theories. But what if there was some corner of it untouched by death threats, disinformation and the baleful influence of Vladimir Putin’s troll farms? What if there was still some corner of the world wide web which lived up to its original promise of connecting people who would not otherwise be connected, and what if once connected they were nothing but agreeable to each other?

Be of good cheer. That corner exists. Not everyone is arguing with Owen Jones and India Willoughby. Not everyone is flaming Lee Anderson and Suella Braverman, fighting glowy-eyed bitcoin cultists or railing against Elon Musk. Some of us are playing Scrabble.

Playing Scrabble on a smartphone app may not change the world – not in a visible, glorious, concrete way. It may not alter the balance of power in Congress or on the battlefield in Ukraine. But, just from time to time, il faut cultiver notre jardin; and contra those who believe that screens are isolating us from one another and fraying the social fabric, here’s a way in which they are not. Little, silly games played online are considerably underappreciated contributors to the web of human interconnection and the sum of human happiness.

I have a couple of old friends whom I don’t see from one year to the next – people who live in Cornwall, or in New York, or even in the remote and inaccessible wilds of south London – but whom I keep up with simply through Scrabble.