How to Type Faster (with three fun games)

I have a theory. My theory is Most People Suck At Typing. I lump that in with my other theories Most People Are Bad Drivers and Most People Are Lazy And Stupid. But those are posts for another day. Today’s post is about typing faster.

According to Typingtest.com, the average typing speed is 36 words per minute (WPM). That means, in the time it took you to read this paragraph, you could have typed:

blah bloo blee blar blah bloo blee blar blah

Meanwhile, the fastest typist in the world just typed this:

That was the most esteemed Barbara Blackburn typing at a speed of 170 words per minute. Fortunately for you, she’s dead now.

But no one ever seriously tries to improve their typing speeds. Why? Because typing tutors are some of the least fun things on Earth, somewhere between throwing out the garbage and vacuuming. And practicing typing is like work. Or working out.

What the typing masses need, are games.

MUDs and MUDing

Before there was World of Warcraft, there was the MUD. A Multi-User Dungeon. It’s a text game that typically looks like this (the commands you would type are prefixed by > signs, everything else is a response from the game):

And so on and so forth. A MUD will generally be one of the ugliest games you will ever play.

Even though WoW and other MMOs have collectively shuttered the Mud Age, some servers are still out there: the MUD Connector has 1154 MUDs in its listings, and new MUDs still pop up each month. To actually play, you’ll need either a MUD client (zMUD is the greatest client ever) or telnet. Telnet is NOT recommended.

Typing of the Dead

Still, there are other good typing games. The best graphical one that I’ve found, available for PC or Sega Dreamcast, is called The Typing of the Dead. It’s the House of the Dead, except the characters have Dreamcasts strapped on their backs and keyboards in their figurative holsters. And instead of shooting, you type. Really fast. Or you die:

This is a run-through I did for the first level.

There is nothing quite like typing for your life (or your character’s life, or whatever). And it helps your typing speed tremendously. Best of all, it scales well for different skill levels: it starts off easily enough, and then ramps up the difficulty as you progress. By Chapter Five, you’ll need to type full phrases to kill a single monster. And there’s one section during the Chapter Five boss fight that requires you to type something like 90+ WPM without making a single mistake. Otherwise you get slapped in the face by a magical fist.

One of the cool features of Typing of the Dead is two-player simultaneous co-op over network. It’s cooperative, but it quickly turns competitive once the two of you realize that the person with the higher score gets a free life every chapter.

As far as I know, you can’t buy Typing of the Dead any more (the game’s at least 10-15 years old), but you can certainly find it on a bunch of abandonware or torrent sites. At 110 megs compressed, it’s small enough that you should be able to find it on several file upload sites. Highly recommended for typists of all skill levels. Definitely my favorite typing game.

Typer Shark

If you’re looking for something a little more basic, or something that you can play on-the-go, there’s always the Typer Shark flash game:

Piranhas require you to type single letters. Really. Quickly.

It’s similar to Typing of the Dead, except you’re a diver trying to get to a shipwreck in (apparently) shark-infested waters. Every round, you’ll get attacked by sharks (single words) or swarmed by guppies (single letters). There’s not much depth to it.

Type away the sharks before you get eaten.

The flash version is available on Yahoo! Games: Typer Shark, and there’s a deluxe Windows version floating around too (you’re supposed to buy it, but I couldn’t find a place that actually sells it).

Finally

Don’t forget to check your progress. Take a monthly typing test. Chat with people. But most of all, have fun.