Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole on how an illconceived app ruined Scrabble
Scrabble is an oasis of calm, orderly thoughtfulness in a world of rubbishy chaos. What could be more relaxing than thinking about words and tidily placing them on a grid? In my household, phone
Scrabble duels have long been a happy pastime, after long days of trying to put words in a grammatically meaningful order: now we can simply play with the tools of our trade rather than having to line them up in order to say something. In these strange days especially, Scrabble is a mindful retreat. It’s a perfect game. You couldn’t ruin it. Or so I thought.
Then I was notified by the official
Scrabble app that it was being sunsetted in favour of a newly developed version called
Scrabble GO, which my partner and I both obediently installed. Instantly we were hurtled into a digital hellscape. It turns out that it is possible to ruin Scrabble, and this version will stand forever as a textbook example for evil developers hoping to destroy the innocent pleasure in any classic pastime.
The interface now looks like a toystore after an explosion, with multiple homescreens filled with luridly coloured nonsense in which it is all too possible to become irretrievably lost. Its entire UX philosophy appears to be “Let’s trick the user into clicking on something they didn’t mean to”. So the player is bombarded with large tiles featuring randomly chosen Facebook contacts, and if you accidentally touch one you are launched into a game of Scrabble with that guy you met at an event years ago and accepted a friend request from out of politeness, but has since revealed himself to be a Brexity antivaxxer who believes Jews invented coronavirus.
Even worse than that are the ‘challenges’ from total strangers, who – if the app’s privacy settings are to be trusted – cannot possibly have challenged me personally because I have chosen to be unsearchable. Perhaps they’re bots, or the developers are lying. Either way, it is impossible to turn these off, so at every moment one is at risk from accidentally starting a game one never wanted, with someone who might be a ‘friend’ or a computer program or a Russian disinformation agent.
Okay, but you can’t ruin the basic mechanics of Scrabble. Or can you? For some reason I now ‘earn’ blue gems by placing high-scoring words in-game, and every so often I am obliged to click on a treasure chest so that more blue gems fly out of it and into my gem hoard. I have no idea what these gems are, until one random swipe among the billions of homescreens reveals that I have the opportunity to buy more gems with real money. Why would I want to do that? Oh, just because, as it turns out, you can spend gems not only on meaningless fripperies like different-coloured tiles but on in-game ‘hints’ or the ability to swap tiles without missing a turn. So you can effectively pay to win. It is the apotheosis of philistine digital money-gouging from children or older people who are quite understandably confused about how this horrific mess all works.
The previous official Scrabble app, by EA, wasn’t perfect, but it did have a very nice addition to the game called the Teacher: after you made a move, the Teacher would show you the best-possible play you could have made (or congratulate you on doing it yourself). In Scrabble GO, you have to pay to see the Teacher’s retrospective wisdom. And so the one authentically educational feature added to the classic game has now been bleakly monetised along with everything else. There is so much else to hate about this game that I don’t have room for in a single column; suffice to say perhaps that if I were the Hasbro executive who signed off on this pathogenic clusterfuck as a perfect ambassador for the globally loved intellectual property that is Scrabble, my dreams would have been haunted ever since.
Of course there are more important problems in the world right now, but Scrabble GO is, by a perverse kind of genius, a comprehensive compendium of everything that was poisonous about pre-pandemic culture. Scrabble GO is not just annoying, though it is very annoying. The deep, inkyblack cynicism of its design reveals an implacable hatred towards anything that cannot be instantly replaced by cash: skill, learning and probably love as well. If modern casino capitalism does not survive the Covid-19 pandemic, this treacherous, greedy ruination of a classic game will stand as a perfect illustration of why it shouldn’t have.
Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net
A comprehensive compendium of everything that was poisonous about pre-pandemic culture