That same friend later stumped me with REINSTAL. Even my spell check is stumped by that one, actually, but the game accepted it, and my dictionary assures me that it is a valid secondary spelling of reinstall. (I don’t approve of that nutso secondary spelling, incidentally, but then, I’ve never gotten over the fact that you no longer have to double the ending consonant when you change the tense on a verb. You kids today with your crazy grammatical style… I’ll be over here on my rocker, kickin’ it old school with the UK and Canada.)

But being here on the receiving end of player feedback adds a whole new dimension to the game for me, because I not only get to learn the new words that my friends know, I get to learn the incredibly bizarre words that complete strangers know as well. This happens mostly in the context of “missing words” reports.

Since Bookworm Heroes came out a couple of months ago, we have received a handful of screenshots of words that were not accepted by the game, and I have looked up each word I didn’t recognize. (It’s the easiest “bug repro” in history — type the word into a dictionary search engine.)

Here are some of the words I learned lately from player reports:

Yottabyte.  It sounds like a fast food cyber cafe to me, but it turns out this is totally a word. I don’t see it coming up in conversation a lot, but hey, neither does vitiate.

Prolamin.  Some kind of protein my gluten-free friends are missing out on.

Reclusory.  Now, looking at that word, I instantly understood what it would be, and, well duh — it’s a place where you’d find a recluse. Still, it was new to me.

(Point of interest: spell check doesn’t recognize any of these words.  Yet they are in the dictionary. This is what vexes people about the English language, isn’t it? Well, that and the whole “eye before ee except after cee” business.)

And then there are the “missing words” reports we get about words that aren’t technically missing… they’re omitted.

Some of these are a matter of standard word game rules.  Proper nouns are typically not playable words. The rule of thumb is simple: would you capitalize the first letter? Then don’t try to play it.  Seattle, for instance, is a proper noun and therefore not a word.

Then there’s another category of omitted words, and this is the grey area that some players find capricious. But hey, it’s a family-friendly game, and parents like to use it as a teaching tool, and we couldn’t be prouder of that.  So… there are some words that we disallowed in the game. If a word has a totally legitimate primary definition… but also a very commonly known offensive slang meaning, for instance, it’s probably not in the game. If a word is theoretically innocuous, but you can easily imagine a parent not wanting to have to explain it to a young child, we may have left it out.

So, by all means, keep letting us know when you find missing words in Bookworm Heroes! While you could play solo word games and just run through your own vocabulary ad nauseam, competitive word games make for endless learning as you literally get to see a set of letters through someone else’s eyes. And hearing from you helps us fill in gaps in our own lexicon… or Lexicon, if you will.

Welcome to a new feature on the BlogRide wherein I have the pleasure of sharing some of my favorite questions we’ve received over the years here at PopCap. As you can probably guess, in recent years, they’ve been as zombie-filled as an episode of Walking Dead, but I’d like to take us back a ways, to a time when I was asked to help a little girl get back to her once-favorite game that had suddenly become traumatic to her… a game called Chuzzle.

Her mother explained that the girl had been happily playing Chuzzle for quite some time, but then she started looking more objectively at the cute, fuzzy creatures on the screen and what seemed to be happening to them when she made matches. The girl realized that she appeared to be killing cute fuzzy creatures and collecting their eyeballs in a jar. She was, understandably, horrified.

I was impressed, as I hadn’t given it that much thought myself… it’s a game, and I’m a grown-up, and they’re Chuzzles, not kittens. But it’s one of those things that once it’s pointed out, it’s kind of in your head. So I put some thought into it as I played the game again, this time with an eye toward explaining the events of the game in a way that might help a child sleep at night. And here’s what I came up with:

Yes, I really didn't think about the eyeballs until this was pointed out to me. Man, adults are jaded, simple-minded creatures at times.

The grid on which you find the Chuzzles is a prison. These cute, fuzzy creatures are being imprisoned by an evil overlord who hates all things adorable (like Gargamel or Sauron).  When you match Chuzzles, you are reuniting them with their comrades and giving them the strength to escape, because these are magical creatures, but they’re so small that they can only muster the energy for teleportation (that’s what makes the “popping” sound!) when they are in a group of three or more.

And the eyeballs? Those aren’t their eyeballs at all! Those are contact lenses they need to protect their eyes, because the atmosphere is highly toxic in the alternate dimension where the prison is located. Once they return to their home dimension, they won’t need protective lenses anymore. What you’re collecting in the jar are mementos of your good deeds, when you freed a bunch of helpless little Chuzzles from their captor and sent them home to their families.

I hope this story helps anyone out there who ever worried about the fate of Chuzzles.