My Word Coach hates me

I’m a word nerd. I like words and I like word games.

In January or February I used a Best Buy certificate from Christmas to buy “My Word Coach” for the Nintendo DS. Since then, I’ve done the various word games on most of my commuting days as well as some others.

My word coach has different drills for spelling and vocabulary. These are meant to build your “Expression Potential,” which is stated in terms of a percentage. I forget where I started those many months back, but I had recently worked myself up to an expression potential of 99%.

It took a while to get to 99%. Each higher expression potential seemed to take longer to achieve. The move from 98 to 99 took months. But I’m a person who likes to finish things. I had to see if I could get to 100%.

Because it took so long to get from a 98 to a 99% expression potential, I knew it would likely take a while to get to 100%. A friend questioned whether it was even possible to get to 100%. “There will always be a time that you can’t think of the right word.” That made sense to me, but the game gave no indication that I was done. It told me that I was nearing a new Expression Potential. So, on the train, on the bus, I kept playing.

During the last week, the coach within my word coach has become increasingly negative. The artificial intelligence behind the games comments has never been as good as “Brain Age.” I would sometimes be lauded for a horrible round or derided for a pretty good one. But over the last few sessions it seemed that I got negative feedback for everything. My coach questioned whether this was important to me, whether I was taking his advice, whether we had a communication problem. Over and over he expressed his disappointment. Still, I assumed that this was just a coincidence. I played on.

But today something else happened. Something bad. After completing my daily word quota and being chided for each exercise, I was given my current expression potential. I’m so used to seeing 99% that I barely noticed that it said…98%! I had lost a point!

The game made no comment on my demotion. Granted today was not my best day in terms of performance, but I’ve certainly had worse. But never before has my potential gone down! Has my performance degraded so much that I no longer deserve a 99% expression potential? Or, did the game designers not anticipate someone trying to play to the “end” and I hit some sort of glitch?

As frustrated as I am to have lost progress, I sort of want to see what it will do next. So, yes, I will keep playing. At least for a while.