Word Nerd: Dispatches From the Games, Grammar, and Geek Underground
Page 16
It was this kind of episode that made me incrementally realize I’d become a dinosaur in a game business and game world that was changing. I got the distinct impression that the new regime of Hasbro executives saw me as a pesky hybrid: SCRABBLE purist and, quite possibly, obstructionist. And I understood that. I’d once been an impatient young executive before my SCRABBLE career, fidgeting during meetings while some sixty-year-old fossil explained, “This is the way we’ve always done things.”
In January of 2013, I knew it was time to go. We all did. After weeks of discussions, it became clear that my vision for the game’s future and that of Hasbro were no longer the same. If I had any doubts, the reality of Hasbro’s new vision was made clear in a conversation with a former digital games colleague who shared some interesting information.
We were talking about word games, and I was informed that Hasbro had bought the rights to make a Words with Friends board game based on the Internet sensation that many have written was actually ripped off from Hasbro’s SCRABBLE itself.
My first thought was ego-driven. Geez, I used to be the first guy you called when the company was even considering anything about word games. Now I’m hearing about it as a fait accompli. Finally, I asked what was the thinking behind this move.
“Well,” he told me, “we really wanted a SCRABBLE-type board game for the future, the next generation.”
I remember thinking: You already have one, man. You already have one.
17
AFTER WORDS: AFTERWARDS
ULTIMATELY WE AGREED THAT THE National SCRABBLE Association after twenty-five years would be dissolved and we would turn our remaining activities over to NASPA and Hasbro marketing executives. July 1, 2013, would be our final day.
From the players’ point of view, things were in good hands. Based in Dallas, NASPA is run by copresidents Christopher Cree and John Chew. This is an exceptional pair of individuals, whose personalities, skills, and experience are both impressive and complimentary.
Chris is a Texan, first and foremost. He’s got a big personality, a small fortune, and a boundless heart. He’s one of the most evolved men I know. Chris has been an extremely successful businessman in several areas and is widely respected both as a top player and as a person.
Years earlier, I’d named Chris as the NSA’s first ombudsman, or player representative, at a time when many members were still dissatisfied with the communication between them and the NSA. It was a successful move on all sides, and Chris’s contribution to the NSA and the game at large is inestimable. He’s also served as an NSA Advisory Board member and was an NSA Person of the Year, a SCRABBLE All*Star, and a tireless organizer.
John Chew is an academic, with specialties in mathematics and computer programming. John is as self-effacing as Chris Cree is gregarious. He has pretty much overseen all official SCRABBLE activities in Canada for the past fifteen or more years, including running North America’s oldest official SCRABBLE club and the Canadian National Championship, among other things. Like Chris, John is a top player who has played in the World SCRABBLE Championship, served on the NSA Advisory Board, and been an NSA Person of the Year. John also travels all over the world as a tournament consultant for other countries.
Together, these guys along with key volunteer staffers have done an amazing job carrying on many of the former NSA activities—especially considering we had substantial corporate funding and a paid staff. They’ve already proven that with successful and well-attended National SCRABBLE Championships and other initiatives.
As for the Hasbro side of things, it’s hard for me to say. Figuratively, it’s hard to say because I haven’t spoken to a Hasbro person since late June 2013, and I don’t really know the company’s current and future plans for the game.
Fortunately—yet again—we have Stefan Fatsis. As he’s done so often and so masterfully, Stefan has addressed this chapter in SCRABBLE history with both passion and perspective. Here, for the final word, is his article from the July 14, 2013, edition of the New York Times.
SCRABBLING OVER SCRABBLE
By Stefan Fatsis
After more than 25 years managing, marketing and refereeing the competitive side of America’s most venerated word game, the National Scrabble Association has packed up its tiles and gone out of business.
Its demise doesn’t reflect a lack of interest in Scrabble, which turns 65 this year. The game has never been more popular. More than a million people, from kids to hipsters to nonagenarians, play daily on Facebook. In May, nearly 200 students in fourth through eighth grades competed in the National School Scrabble Championship. On Saturday, more than 500 die-hards, myself included, will gather in Las Vegas for the National Scrabble Championship, a five-day, 31-game anagrammatic marathon.
Instead, the death of Scrabble’s organizing body—which closed on July 1 following years of declining financial support from Hasbro, the game’s owner—reflects a broader conflict between corporate and intellectual forces in American cultural life.
Guess which one is winning. Played at its highest level, Scrabble is a strategic sibling of chess, backgammon and the Chinese game go. Top tournament players must master as many of the 178,000 acceptable 2- through 15-letter words as possible, “see” them among a jumble of letters, determine which maximize the chances of winning and consider an opponent’s possible countermoves, all while a timer ticks from 25 minutes to zero for each player to make all plays.
Like those old games, competitive Scrabble is a math-brain exercise, one combining spatial relations, board geometry and language maximization. Unlike them, it is owned by a company, whose goal is to generate revenue through the sale of sets and spinoffs and downloads.
“You have to understand that we are in the games-making business. We are not in the altruism business,” a marketing executive for Selchow & Righter, Scrabble’s first corporate parent, said during a meeting with tournament players lobbying for support in 1985. But those words could just as easily have been spoken last week by an executive of Hasbro, which has owned the rights to Scrabble in the United States and Canada since 1989.
During the past quarter-century, Hasbro has spent millions of dollars financing the independent National Scrabble Association. The association organized national, world and school championships; booked the winners on the “Today” show and “Jimmy Kimmel Live”; sanctioned more than 200 local tournaments a year; maintained a database of several thousand dues-paying players and calculated their tournament ratings; placed the game on ESPN for six straight years; published a newsletter; worked with Merriam-Webster on the official Scrabble dictionary (a fifth edition is in the works; get ready for “gi,” “cuz,” “ixnay” and more); and fielded inquiries ranging from disputatious living-room players seeking rules adjudications to a 1990s media blowup over the inclusion of the word “jew” in the lexicon.
Was that corporate money well spent? The publicity that the Scrabble association helped generate no doubt sold more than a few boards. But the group’s performance could not and should not have been measured in such a reductive way.
Scrabble isn’t a marketing or earnings-report star. It can’t be hyped with an online vote resulting in a cat’s replacing an iron, which Hasbro employed to juice sales of Monopoly. It doesn’t rely on new cards that players need to buy to keep playing, like the Hasbro game Magic: The Gathering.
But as a game, Scrabble is remarkable. It carefully balances skill and luck and risk and reward. It exploits the breadth and beauty of the English language. It fosters mind-blowing creativity, heart-stopping tension and computer-stretching quantitative analysis.
Most people playing online or at the kitchen table aren’t aware of Scrabble’s complexity, let alone its tournament culture. Hasbro, obviously, is. The corporate question is whether it has a responsibility to both worlds, casual and competitive—and whether that responsibility extends to times like these, when Hasbro has been laying off workers and focusing on top-selling products.
Corporation
s from Coca-Cola to the N.F.L. are caretakers of some slice of history. Usually that history is central to the business. To Hasbro, Scrabble isn’t. But it is an enduring piece of Americana, developed in a garden apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, by an unemployed architect named Alfred Butts who spent years perfecting his game before it swept the country in the 1950s. I have yet to find a parallel for it—that is, a proprietary game with a subculture whose passion and sophistication transcend its ownership.
What’s the value of that to a $4 billion corporation? Is it more or less than the $700,000 or $800,000 a year Hasbro spent on the National Scrabble Association at its peak—before it stopped paying for club and tournament Scrabble in 2008 and slashed the budget for school and casual Scrabble to the point that the association decided to cease operations.
But forget about money. What’s the value of something like Scrabble to the culture at large? Does its owner have an obligation to nurture each side of the game, whether or not it jibes with the prosaic nature of the toy industry or boosts profits? Do history and intellect matter?
I spoke recently with Hasbro’s chief marketing officer, John Frascotti. He said the right things about Scrabble’s past and its competitive side. Hasbro is “committed to spending marketing dollars to promote the Scrabble brand and to promote Scrabble play,” Mr. Frascotti said. He told me he believed the company could do what the Scrabble association did, at least for schools and casual players. “Judge us as we act, not as we say,” he said.
I promised to keep an open mind. But since I started playing competitively and reporting on Scrabble 15 years ago, I’ve shaken hands with a moving walkway of Hasbro executives, all of whom have pledged love for and commitment to the game. And then the cuts came. Hasbro recently withdrew its last, token contribution to the national championship: $15,000 in prize money.
The winner of the tournament in Las Vegas will still be paid $10,000. After the company pulled the plug on them in 2008, competitive players formed their own governing body, the North American Scrabble Players Association, and, thanks to higher dues and participation fees, the tournament circuit has kept humming. If Hasbro does the same with School Scrabble—Mr. Frascotti said it wouldn’t—I’ll help find a way for my 11-year-old daughter and other young devotees to compete for a title in an educational game that they adore.
Hasbro knows that we players will volunteer to do what it had paid others to do for it: support a culture that doesn’t necessarily fit in an earnings-driven world of fad toys and movie tie-ins. Maybe that’s smart business. But with ownership comes responsibility, and sometimes even a little altruism.
Well said, Stefan.
It is now August 1, 2014. I recognize, accept, and occasionally savor my ongoing irrelevance in the world of SCRABBLE. I still play every day online against a dozen or so opponents. They range from some of the top players to casual players I’ve encountered along the way. The former NSA headquarters—an old sea captain’s house in historic Greenport, New York—has had the sign removed and its files emptied. I still hear about the club and tournament scene, only now it’s second- or thirdhand and often weeks later.
Remnants remain. This winter I started a wood-stove fire using a handful of old wooden racks as kindling. Mostly, though, it’s tiles. For years, random letters have turned up everywhere—in pockets, in drawers, under furniture, on the floor of my car, in the yard. One day shortly after I resigned, I found two tiles in a corner in my attic. They were a Z and an E. I knelt down and switched around them on the floor. E Z. Yeah, I thought. E Z. Yeah, EASY!
I knew everything was going to be okay.
ILLUSTRATIONS
The SCRABBLE 50th Anniversary Celebrity SCRABBLE Tournament at Madison Square Garden in New York, March 1998. Former Saturday Night Live star and current U.S. senator Al Franken and his partner, NBA Hall of Fame player Walt “Clyde” Frazier, plot their next move. (Marty Heitner photo/Alfred Butts Estate)
One of the early prototypes of SCRABBLE from the 1930s. Note the architect’s paper used by the game’s inventor, Alfred Mosher Butts. Also note on the left that the game was still called Criss Cross Words at the time. (Marty Heitner photo/Alfred Butts Estate)
SCRABBLE inventor Alfred Mosher Butts in a publicity shot circa 1980. A brilliant, creative, and humble man, he admitted he was astonished by the worldwide success of his idea. It’s estimated over 100 million SCRABBLE sets have been sold. (Selchow & Righter photo)
The late Rita Norr with John D. Williams Jr. in 1987, moments after she became the only woman in history to win the National SCRABBLE Championship. This photograph was taken at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. It turned out that Rita and John owned houses barely a mile apart on eastern Long Island, more than two thousand miles away, where they played a match three days later. (AP photo)
MULLIGATAWNY—one of the most famous SCRABBLE moves of all time. It was played by the late Joe Simpson against his friend Fred Smedley at the legendary Washington Square Park SCRABBLE scene in New York. Fred opened with TAWNY. Joe studied his rack and found MULLIGA. Fred challenged, and they had to walk to Joe’s nearby apartment for a dictionary that contained the word! Mulligatawny is a rich soup seasoned with curry. (Patty Hocker photo)
Thanks, but no thanks. Here’s a 1933 letter from game manufacturer Milton Bradley to Alfred Mosher Butts rejecting his submission of an early version of SCRABBLE. (Marty Heitner photo/Alfred Butts Estate)
The largest National SCRABBLE Championship in history, with over 840 contestants playing for the $25,000 top prize. Trey Wright defeated SCRABBLE National, ALL*STARS, and Superstars Showdown champion David Gibson for the 2004 title in New Orleans. (Patty Hocker photo)
Highest game score ever! Mike Cresta defeated Wayne Yorra 830–490 in the highest-scoring official game in history at the Lexington, Massachusetts, club on October 12, 2006. Cresta’s 830 points eradicated the previous record of 770 points held by California’s Mark Landsberg, and the combined 1,320 points shattered the previous mark by almost 200 points. Among the high-scoring plays: JOUSTED, LADYLIKE, FLATFISH, UNDERDOG, SCAMSTER, and QUIXOTRY. Astonishingly, neither player is a tournament expert. (Patty Hocker photo)
Thanks, but no thanks (part 2). Here’s a 1934 letter from game manufacturer Parker Brothers to Alfred Mosher Butts rejecting his submission of an early version of SCRABBLE. Somebody goofed. (Marty Heitner photo/Alfred Butts Estate)
SCRABBLE inventor Alfred Mosher Butts, pictured here fifty years after inventing the classic word game. Previous game owner Selchow & Righter uncovered a second game he’d constructed and named it Alfred’s Other Game. Positioned as a solitaire version of SCRABBLE, it was launched in the mid-1980s but never really took off. Someone at the company’s advertising agency thought it would be a good idea to do a James Bond–inspired photograph for the marketing campaign.
APPENDIX
TOP TEN PLAYERS IN NORTH AMERICA AS
OF JANUARY 1, 2015
Please see www.cross-tables.com for most current stats
1. Nigel Richards
2141
2. Adam Logan
2097
3. David Gibson
2090
4. Will Anderson
2061
5. Mack Meller
2039
5. Jesse Day
2039
7. Ian Weinstein
2024
8. Conrad Bassett-Bouchard
2023
9. David Wiegand
2022
10. Joel Sherman
2010
ANSWERS TO NSSC CONTEST ON PAGE 112
CERULEAN, SCHMOOZE, QWERTY, QUIXOTIC, HIJACK, ZYGOTE, SHELLAC, ZOOLOGY, INQUIRY, BAZAAR
ANSWERS TO ANAGRAMS ON PAGE 162
1. PYRIC = PRICY
2. CHURL = LURCH
3. TRADED = DARTED
4. SADDLE = ADDLES
5. RACOON = CORONA
6. NASTILY = SAINTLY
7. PAYOUTS = AUTOPSY
8. BEEFIER = FREEBIE
> 9. DROOLED = DOODLER
10. EXCLAIMS = CLIMAXES
11. SPAWNING = WINGSPAN
12. INDULGED = DELUDING
“OFFENSIVE” WORD LIST REFERRED TO IN CHAPER 4
Words removed from the Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary in the mid-1990s because they were deemed offensive:
ABO
ABOS
ARSE
ASSHOLE
ASSHOLES
BADASS
BADASSED
BADASSES
BALLSIER
BALLSIEST
BALLSY
BAZOOMS
BLOWJOB
BLOWJOBS
BOCHE
BOCHES
BOFFED
BOFFING
BOINK
BOINKED
BOINKING
BOINKS
BOLLOCKS
BOOBIE
BOODIES
BOODY
BUBBA
BUBBAS
BUBBIES
BUBBY
BUCKRA
BUCKRAS
BULLDYKE
BULLDYKES
BULLSHAT
BULLSHIT
BULLSHITS
BULLSHITTED
BULLSHITTING
COJONES
COLOREDS
COMSYMP
COMSYMPS
CRAPPER
CRAPPERS
CUNT
CUNTS
DAGO
DAGOES
DAGOS
DARKEY
DARKEYS
DARKIE
DARKIES
DARKY