This week on selected shorts, authors including John Updike play games, or at least their characters do.

And it turns out that from board games to mind games, the stakes are higher than the rules of that particular game.

I'm Meg Wallitzer. Pick up your tiles and join me.

You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction,

one short story at a time.

At first, the word game suggests something lighthearted.

After all, we've been playing them since childhood, from hide-and-seek to checkers and beyond.

I am what's known as a word person, and I say that not to brag, but to distinguish myself

from a numbers person.

If I see a number, I get really nervous.

Numbers to me are like wild animals.

I don't know what they're capable of or exactly how to understand them.

Words, however, seem closer to domesticated creatures.

They've existed in my home for my entire life.

I start the day with wordle and spelling bee,

and I play a few games of Scrabble online with strangers who I know only by their handles,

or sometimes by the comments they occasionally hurl if I win a game.

Comments such as, nice work, cheater, and yet I go back to the Scrabble board again and again, because words are what I love.

As a writer, my job is arranging words into sentences, paragraphs, stories, essays, novels.

But as a Scrabble player, my so-called job is rearranging letters into words.

It's as simple as that.

But with Scrabble and a variety of games, it's often true that somewhere along the line,

...