When does a rip-off stop being a rip-off?
Here's one way to find out: If you put your ear to your monitor and listen carefully, you can hear the clink of tiles hitting double-word scores at an increasingly ginger pace.
That's the sound of several hundred thousand rip-off-Scrabble fans trying their best to wallop their friends before their rip-off-Scrabble game gets lawyered out of existence.
The game is actually called Scrabulous, the kind of dodgy name you'd expect to find on a public-washroom vending machine (“Scrabulous: Compare with ‘Scrabble'“). Sure enough, the game is a very literal online duplicate of Scrabble, right down to the little yellow tiles.
Scrabulous has been around since 2005, developed by a pair of brothers in India. It was only after Facebook opened its doors for third-party developers to write add-ons for its social network, though, that the game took off. The Scrabulous application let Facebook users face off against their existing friends, without having to sign into another website. Today, it boasts 600,000 active users, playing millions of games.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this story is that it took until January, 2008, for the inevitable to happen. Mattel and Hasbro, the owners of Scrabble, finally came a-knocking, cease-and-desist orders in hand. The news that Scrabulous might go to meet its maker – rather literally – has garnered global attention. The we-like-free-stuff brigades have gone rushing to the barricades (or, as the case may be, the Facebook groups), and out goes the rallying cry: Free Scrabulous! Well, okay. The question is whether there's anything to free. This is, after all, a straight-up copy of a board game. If copyright laws do not protect against someone taking your work, replicating it online right down to the colour of the triple-word scores, changing three letters in the name and making a pile of money from it, what exactly are they for?
At best, you could call Scrabulous guileless: Despite the iffy name, it's so earnest in its desire to accurately duplicate Scrabble, it's almost an homage – and a profitable homage at that. Its creators are reported to be making tens of thousands a month in advertising revenue.
On the other hand, even the most literal adaptation changes in translation, and – no thanks to its creators – Scrabulous has taken on a life of its own. The Web makes Scrabulous a very different experience than Scrabble, with the help of two simple expedients: the lack of a time limit, and that thing called Google. Instead of a game where players see how well they can assemble words on the fly, Scrabulous winds up being a game where users spend ages doing whatever it takes to find a word with which to shaft their opponents.
It's possible to play Scrabulous by standard Scrabble rules, but the idea of challenging a bogus word against a dictionary is moot when everyone has access to Google as they play. That's why, by default, Scrabulous won't even let you play invalid words.
So players adapt. Scrabulous provides an in-game dictionary that will tell you whether or not a word is valid. Players therefore proceed on the principle that if a word sounds like it's real, it's worth a shot. SPING? EMATE? JOTIER? PENG? EMBIGGEN? Scrabulous will serially reject them until – bingo! – you hit on one that actually exists.
That's the fair-cricket approach. For the less ethically encumbered, a small ecosystem of Scrabble-solver websites will let the computer figure out the best moves for you. In many cases, artless cheating will leave clear traces of fraud on the Scrabulous board, usually in the form of big words from a dim friend. But there's really no telling what a person is up to, left alone in a room with Google. If our decade-long encounter with the Web has taught us one thing, it is that.
The upshot is that Scrabulous is a great deal of fun, just of a different sort than the board game. This makes it hard to pin down the core of its success. Is it the unexpected novelty that the online medium has given it? Or is it just the fact that Scrabble is a great game, a quality that's been passed along to its illegitimate progeny by way of studious and diligent copying?
Despite threats of an imminent shutdown, Scrabulous is still online as of this writing, and its creators say they can't discuss the situation. Game giant Electronic Arts owns the digital rights to Scrabble, and they're not talking either. All this has led to speculation that a Scrabulous buyout is in the works. If the game vanished, it would certainly be a blow to Facebook, whose application platform has yet to yield many bona fide hits, and you can bet they're doing what they can to broker a deal.
If Scrabulous succumbs, it will be a sad day for distracted Facebook users, but no great travesty against creative expression will have occurred. If, however, Scrabulous morphs into an authorized product, it will prove itself the little rip-off that could, driven to legitimacy by hundreds of thousands of users and a happy accident. Behold the promise of the Internet. As every player who's determined to rearrange “GHZOLPM” into a legitimate word knows, there must be a way.
