I get it – you’re a Scrabble purist horrified by Mattel’s “unforgivable” update of the game. They’ve released a “dumbed-down” version in which players work collaboratively on a series of challenges rather than compete against each other. “We want to ensure the game continues to be inclusive for all players,” Mattel vice-president Ray Adler said.
You’re triggered and must voice your outrage because Scrabble is no mere game; it’s an institution! And institutions must be protected. (Except any that dodgy old white guys established.) These Gen Z snowflakes need more grit. They need to understand how it feels to have your ego annihilated when you’re 20 points ahead and someone pulls out QUIXOTRY (27 points) at the eleventh hour!
Drawing a blank: Scrabble Together is designed with “inclusivity and collaboration” in mind.
My family of origin is a Scrabble-playing one, although we quickly adapted to Bananagrams (just letters, no board) because it reflected our preferred style of manic gameplay. We also loved a game called Nerts, in which multiple decks of cards are sorted into Solitaire-style piles around the table at the speed of light – the original “safe space” where you could loudly emotionally deregulate.
According to research by Mattel, younger players aren’t as interested in winning as they are in connecting with one another. And while it sounds like they should put cement in their Weet-Bix and harden up, if you look around or read the news, we all need a good dose of Scrabble Together. Imagine a world where Putin and Biden work together to spell the word OBLITERATION (14 points) instead of enacting it.
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When did we get so purist about Scrabble anyway? We coped with Bananagrams, Upwords (when you could supersede a word by piling letters on top of each other) and Words with Friends when Scrabble went digital, and you could play against Roxxy317 in Texas. And don’t tell me you’ve never played Dirty Scrabble, where words must be “naughty” (or you must explain how they might be interpreted as such, such as ADMINISTRATIVE – 20 points).
I couldn’t handle a full game of Scrabble these days because my brain is rapidly devolving into its original lizard form, with only Pavlovian responses to KFC ads. I started doing jigsaw puzzles to preserve the diminishing grey matter. It feels like a brain massage, and there’s the bonus of meeting a network of rabid puzzle fanatics who sit like monks for hours, staring at broken pictures like they’re solving the meaning of life. But try selling that to young people raised on a steady diet of TikToks.
The “great rewiring”, as Jonathan Haidt calls it in his recent book The Anxious Generation, is well and truly under way, and it’s only a matter of time before we don’t even need words; you’ll think about a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and one will be 3D-printed in your kitchen. Or you’ll grunt into your computer, and ChatGPT will translate it into a heartfelt poem or novel. Words will be a quaint relic of a primitive race of humans who, heaven forbid, used them to compete against each other for fun! (DOLTS – six points).
Haidt’s greatest concern is the “radical transformation of childhood into something inhuman: a phone-based existence”. You only need to look at videos of people using Apple Vision Pro in public, looking like mimes on acid, to realise how close we are to a complete digital existence where bodies are simply Ubers for our brains.
