By Terri Schwartz
July 29 might have been an ordinary summer afternoon for some people, but for many bored Facebook users it was a somber day. The Scrabulous application, a virtual version of the popular board game Scrabble, was removed from Facebook in the United States and Canada.
According to media reports, Hasbro, the company that owns the board game, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against computer programmers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla and their company RJ Softwares, the India-based host of Scrabulous.
“I was a little surprised at first when Hasbro filed the lawsuit,” said Marshall Brennan, a sophomore chemistry and psychology major. “I soon realized that it was inevitable, since Scrabulous was effectively a 100 percent knock-off of Scrabble, but that didn’t make it any less irritating. I was really hoping that Hasbro would settle for just assuming ownership of the Scrabulous application.”
Brennan is not the only student upset about the Scrabulous shutdown: there are a number of “Save Scrabulous” groups on Facebook; the largest has more than 52,000 members.
Students said they enjoyed the game because it kept them occupied while at the same time stimulating their minds.
“Scrabulous [was] an awesome time killer,” said sophomore business major Rich Dallojacono. “I played it all the time at work, while simulataneously enhancing my vocabulary.”
Scrabble is a popular board game whose North American rights are owned by Hasbro. Under the name Criss-Cross Words, the game was created during the Great Depression by an out-of-work architect named Alfred Mosher Butts, according to a history of the game posted on the Hasbro website. Butts created the game in a crossword puzzle-style format, where each letter used on a certain square earns a player a certain number of points. It was not until the 1950s that the game, which had been renamed Scrabble, started gaining popularity.
In 2007, Scrabulous was launched on Facebook as a game application that users could access from their profile pages.
“All the rules were basically exactly the same as the official game of Scrabble, so I thought it was an obvious rip-off,” said junior criminal justice major Tony DelVecchio.
Hasbro sent cease-and-desist orders to Facebook in January asking them to remove the Scrabulous application, according to media reports. However, it was not until late July, when Hasbro was ready to launch its own version of the game for Facebook, that Scrabulous was forced to shut down.
Hasbro, with Electronic Arts (EA), released its Scrabble Facebook application shortly after Scrabulous disappeared. But the new game has not proved as popular as Scrabulous and users gave it a rating of 1.3 stars out of a possible 5 stars on Facebook.
While it was still available on Facebook, Scrabulous was Facebook’s most popular separately owned application and had been receiving more than 500,000 monthly visits, according to the website. The new application is drawing a little more than half of that: around 260,000 monthly visitors.
“My experience with the Hasbro application has basically been that it seldom works, and, when it does, it’s bogged down with really superfluous animations and glitz,” Brennan said. “The appeal of Scrabulous was that I could get in, get out and call each move ‘done’ quickly, but with the Hasbro [application], it just tries too hard, I think, to assert itself as the ‘real’ Scrabble. It loads more slowly, it takes more steps, and getting used to, to get into a game, and it just seems to lack a lot of the simple, but familiar, aspects of Scrabulous.”
According to a statement from EA, the Hasbro and EA offering is “an authorized, licensed Scrabble game experience that people familiar with Scrabble can instantly recognize as Scrabble.”
DelVecchio said he had not known about Hasbro’s official online game until a few days ago, but he seemed optimistic about its possibilities.
“Scrabulous was basically just an easier way to play Scrabble online and at work, which was the best part of it,” DelVecchio said. “If Hasbro put out an official version then, hell yeah, I’ll play it.”
Since their previous game’s removal, the Agarwalla brothers have created a new, similar word game called Wordscraper, available on Facebook. The rules are slightly different from Scrabble and Scrabulous, and the board is made of circles instead of squares. After nearly two weeks on the social networking site, the game has almost 185,000 users who have given it a 4.5 out of 5 star rating.
EA also released a Scrabble game for the iPhone July 11 and said it plans to release the full, official version of the Scrabble Facebook application, to replace the current beta version, sometime in mid-August.
