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Several days ago a friend sent me a message via Facebook that said, “It’s your move in Scrabulous!” Since I can’t turn down a challenge I immediately joined the fray and was doing pretty well…until this morning. I logged in and got this message: It doesn’t matter that I was ahead by about thirty points. I’ve played Scrabble for years and fully expected to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory before the game was over. What irked me was the suddenness of it. As I read in the New York Times, “It is a bit of a surprise that Scrabulous, an obvious copy of the board game Scrabble, managed to avoid shutdown as long as it did.” What’s a bit of a surprise to me is that the makers of Scrabulous didn’t have any kind of approval from Hasbro. This is a trademark violation that’s so boneheadedly obvious that I can’t help wondering how many times the programmers have fallen for the line “Did you hear they took the word ‘gullible’ out of the dictionary?” I’m not trying to defend the Hasbro conglomerate, which probably didn’t lose any revenue because of this, but, well, what were the programmers, or, for that matter, the Facebook programmers who approved it, thinking? In my own case, of course, ignorance of the provenance is no excuse, although I’m a little ticked that I didn’t at least get to finish the game I’d started.
Scrabulous is still up and running on its own site, at least for now, where I can go up against a computer and get my head handed to me on a platter. In my first game I had the usual early boost of pride when I managed to fit PUKE onto a double-word score, but then the computer (which, inexplicably, looked like a pirate while I had the avatar of some kind of alien or anthropomorphized insect) put EQUANT on a triple-word score. I was dead in the water, and, after about half a dozen passed turns, the computer finally let me throw in the towel. I like playing with another person better, anyway, although I’m not sure I want to start another game just yet. The site could go down at any time.
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This is a bummer. I had nine games going on Facebook. I guess I should just be happy that I got to play it for as long as I did.
Nine games? Suddenly I don’t feel so bad. But it is a bummer, and the Scrabulous computer cheats. I’ll give it an incredibly obscure word like “kexes”, but when it passed off “MM” as a word I wanted to choke its silly little avatar.
Perhaps it would be possible to copyright “Hangman” and then sue first graders. BTW is that your avatar in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?