You Look Scrabulous
How a stuffy board game became a sleazy internet pickup joint.
by Will Doig
March 24, 2008
"Flirty girlz only who can also have S.E.X.Y. chat," reads Syed's open-table Scrabulous challenge. "Age must be less than thirty. Send a msg before playing a game." According to his stat board, Syed's player's rating is 947 — not dismal, but nothing to brag about — and he's looking for hot women who play according to the English TWL dictionary.
He'll find them. Scrabulous, the Facebook application that allows users to play Scrabble against each other online, has turned Hasbro's slow, stodgy board game for vocabulary enthusiasts into one of the internet's sleazier pickup joints. "Any ladies want to play strip Scrabulous?" beckons Jamie. "Hot women, MILF only, no men, prefer Canadian," specifies Mike. "Just waiting 4 the right horney [sic] women to appear!!!!" announces Andrew, adding, "Like blondes but all welcome."
It's not just men trolling for women, either. "I've played games where I have been made to feel so horny I had to touch myself," says Alicia, a slightly older woman with whom I ended up engaged in a particularly licentious match. The atmosphere within Scrabulous has become so amorous that players who don't want to talk dirty while they play have begun specifying so: "Looking for a player with a similar rating to me, no sex chat nonsense," reads one open challenge. "Just a regular game, no pervs," reads another. A few weeks ago, the game's administrators finally added a function that cordons off "adults only" tables into a section separate from games "suitable for all ages."
If you're one of the increasingly rare internet users who doesn't play Scrabulous, here's how it works: You can play against people you know, or you can play the "open tables," which are hosted by people looking for challengers. As an open-table host, you can indicate what type of challenger you're looking for — for example, you're looking for a high-level player (Scrabulous rates players with its own ranking system) who wants to play in real-time (as opposed to over the course of several days) and who is a twentysomething, buxom brunette with filthy syntax. The game itself is just like Scrabble, and to the right of the board is a text field where you can chat back and forth with your opponent, a space for two consenting adults to talk about whatever they want.
And what they often want to talk about is sex. They want to know what you look like, whether you're married, and what you're into. They want to flirt like a drunken bachelor on a singles cruise. The atmosphere ranges from playfully flirty to shockingly depraved. Which prompts the question: Why Scrabulous? What is it about this game that's generating such heavy virtual petting?
Because on its surface, Scrabble is no Twister. Its board is a prosaic, melancholy wash of pallid blues, reds and grays. Opportunities to maneuver are restrictive (no saucy diagonals allowed). And scoring is banal — most letters are worth an underwhelming one point. Most mood-killing of all, the game is slow and it's long — a ten-minute wait between turns isn't uncommon. Combine a fireside game of Scrabble with a bottle of Chianti, and you and your date will be asleep before the first triple-word score.
This monotonous pace, however, is perfect for an online game of smutty Scrabulous. For many players, once the lewd dialogue begins, it supercedes the game itself. Long stretches of time between turns mean ample chance to hone one's dirty talk. "I don't think people really pay attention to the game once the flirting has begun," says Jack, a serious player with an impressive rating of 1,500+. He often seizes upon his opponent's distraction to win the game and further increase his rank. And he appreciates the metronomic rhythm that regulates and compliments the natural back-and-forth of verbal seduction. "The excitement comes from the fact that you have to take turns to flirt: your turn, my turn. You have to wait until the other person has completed their turn before you get in your next line."
Another advantage for a high-level player like Jack is that he gets to show off his intellect with the woman he's flirting with in a way that a regular chat room wouldn't necessarily allow. An expansive vocabulary is to a Scrabulous player what a smooth baritone is to Marvin Gaye. "For women, it's all about creative intelligence," says Annie, while laying down "garment" for eighteen points. She's not interested in playing against Neanderthals "who write dumb things like 'I want to play women who are double-Ds only.' This is about intelligence." Just as it has been since Cyrano wooed Roxane with his silver-tongued prose.
For Shaina, Scrabulous is about being able to flirt in a location that's wholesome blandness feels safe and comfortable. She started using the game to talk with men after her recent breakup. "I'm just back into the single life after two years, and I don't even know where to start," she says. "I am shy in real life, for the most part. But people on here are just flirtable. I'm too shy to talk to them in person, so I talk to them here." After a couple bad experiences meeting online dates in real life, she decided that Scrabulous was a better scene for her than personal ads because there's no expectation it will lead to a face-to-face meeting.
But though its bland exterior may give it the appearance of a safe zone, Scrabulous doesn't act as a barrier against more vulgar tte--ttes. There are two types of Scrabulous come-ons: the fizzy, giggly, coquettish flirtations Jack, Annie and Shaina are talking about, and the kind Alicia (who becomes so horny she has to touch herself) is talking about. And the kind that Barry is seeking. His open table solicited "bi married men" to challenge him to a game, and in response to my request for an interview, he'd only persistently ask, "How big is your cock?" He continued to press me for details about my personal dimensions and what I might like to do with him if we were in the same room, even while continuing the game at hand, laying down words like "thermal" and "bisque."
Which raises the point: during all this chatting, there's often a legitimate (and by its very nature, dry) Scrabble game in progress. Sometimes, as Jack pointed out, the game falls by the wayside entirely as the come-ons intensify. But many times it doesn't. During my heatedly flirtatious game with Alicia — during which she told me that she likes to "touch [her] tits, get wet, save the mental image for later" — she threw up over two hundred points, including several high-value words like "ravers" (twenty-seven) and "pom" (twenty-one). Perhaps the competitive energy generated by a game of Scrabulous enhances a certain kind of flirting, an eroticism fostered by an increasingly passionate rivalry.
My game with Alicia ended several days after we'd begun it. In the beginning, it had heated up quickly, producing a conversation transcript neither one of us would want our significant others to ever lay eyes on. But as the game dragged on through the work week, we found ourselves settling into a more polite rhythm, bantering mainly in practicalities and light teasing. Things cooled with time, as is apt to happen with any couple. But that didn't make the experience less pleasurable. When all was said and done, the score stood at 257 to 233. She'd beaten me, but it was close, so we figured we were a pretty good match, and decided to play each other again sometime. n°
©2008 Will Doig and hooksexup.com