From a novel called Praise, by Andrew McGahan:

Cynthia was a good Scrabble player. Not many people I knew were. I played a lot of Scrabble. You had to believe in Scrabble to be any good at it. You had to be prepared to play strategically, to agonise. Most people couldn't be bothered, they put down the first word they saw just to end the pain. And they lost.

Scrabble, if you cared to think about it, was like a lot of things I could see about life...Sometimes you just didn't get the letters, there was nothing you could do. Luck was the real decider. Luck was what it all came down to. Scrabble was exactly like life.

I'm not quite that philosophical about Scrabble because I have other games to be philosophical about. It's sort of my job. But I do love Scrabble. I actually have a weekly Scrabble group. No joke.

So I was happy to take up Electronic Arts new Scrabble for the Nintendo DS. It's one of those rare cool games that lets you hold the DS sideways, like a book. I wasn't expecting much. I don't really care about the cute little training exercises, or the score tracking, or the game modes. And I certainly don't care about the multiplayer, since I already have a perfectly good copy of the real thing. But I was looking forward to just practicing against whatever computer opponents Electronic Arts has programmed. I just wanted to agonise* over whatever letters I was given.

But you want to know what killed it for me? The DS. I'll carefully slide a tile over a square where I want to place it, and as soon as I lift the stylus, the game somehow assumes I want to drop the tile two squares to the right and three squares down, or maybe just one square to the left, or sometimes in some ungodly far corner of the screen. This is not an exaggeration. EA's latest Scrabble is one of the sloppiest bits of DSery I have ever endured.

* McGahan is Australian, which is like being British.