New York Times AFTER more than 25 years managing, marketing and refereeing the competitive side of America’s most venerated word game, the National Scrabble Association has packed up its tiles and gone out of business. Its demise doesn’t reflect a lack of interest in Scrabble, which turns 65 this year. The game has never been more popular. More than a million people, from kids to hipsters to nonagenarians, play daily on Facebook. In May, nearly 200 students in fourth through eighth grades competed in the National School Scrabble Championship. On Saturday, more than 500 die-hards, myself included, will gather in Las Vegas for the National Scrabble Championship, a five-day, 31-game anagrammatic marathon. Instead, the death of Scrabble’s organizing body — which closed on July 1 following years of declining financial support from Hasbro, the game’s owner — reflects a broader conflict between corporate and intellectual forces in American cultural life. Guess which one is winning. Played at its highest level, Scrabble is a strategic sibling of chess, backgammon and the Chinese game go. Top tournament players must master as many of the 178,000 acceptable 2- through 15-letter words as possible, “see” them among a jumble of letters, determine which maximize the chances of winning and consider an opponent’s possible countermoves, all while a timer ticks from 25 minutes to zero for each player to make all plays. Like those old games, competitive Scrabble is a math-brain exercise, one combining spatial relations, board geometry and language maximization. Unlike them, it is owned by a company, whose goal is to generate revenue through the sale of sets and spinoffs and downloads. “You have to understand that we are in the games-making business. We are not in the altruism business,” a marketing executive for Selchow & Righter, Scrabble’s first corporate parent, said during a meeting with tournament players lobbying for support in 1985. But those words could just as easily have been spoken last week by an executive of Hasbro, which has owned the rights to Scrabble in the United States and Canada since 1989. During the past quarter-century, Hasbro has spent millions of dollars financing the independent National Scrabble Association. The association organized national, world and school championships; booked the winners on the “Today” show and “Jimmy Kimmel Live”; sanctioned more than 200 local tournaments a year; maintained a database of several thousand dues-paying players and calculated their tournament ratings; placed the game on ESPN for six straight years; published a newsletter; worked with Merriam-Webster on the official Scrabble dictionary (a fifth edition is in the works; get ready for “gi,” “cuz,” “ixnay” and more); and fielded inquiries ranging from disputatious living-room players seeking rules adjudications to a 1990s media blowup over the inclusion of the word “jew” in the lexicon. Was that corporate money well spent? The publicity that the Scrabble association helped generate no doubt sold more than a few boards. But the group’s performance could not and should not have been measured in such a reductive way. Scrabble isn’t a marketing or earnings-report star. It can’t be hyped with an online vote resulting in a cat’s replacing an iron, which Hasbro employed to juice sales of Monopoly. It doesn’t rely on new cards that players need to buy to keep playing, like the Hasbro game Magic: The Gathering. But as a game, Scrabble is remarkable. It carefully balances skill and luck and risk and reward. It exploits the breadth and beauty of the English language. It fosters mind-blowing creativity, heart-stopping tension and computer-stretching quantitative analysis. Most people playing online or at the kitchen table aren’t aware of Scrabble’s complexity, let alone its tournament culture. Hasbro, obviously, is. The corporate question is whether it has a responsibility to both worlds, casual and competitive — and whether that responsibility extends to times like these, when Hasbro has been laying off workers and focusing on top-selling products. Corporations from Coca-Cola to the N.F.L. are caretakers of some slice of history. Usually that history is central to the business. To Hasbro, Scrabble isn’t. But it is an enduring piece of Americana, developed in a garden apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, by an unemployed architect named Alfred Butts who spent years perfecting his game before it swept the country in the 1950s. I have yet to find a parallel for it — that is, a proprietary game with a subculture whose passion and sophistication transcend its ownership. What’s the value of that to a $4 billion corporation? Is it more or less than the $700,000 or $800,000 a year Hasbro spent on the National Scrabble Association at its peak — before it stopped paying for club and tournament Scrabble in 2008 and slashed the budget for school and casual Scrabble to the point that the association decided to cease operations. But forget about money. What’s the value of something like Scrabble to the culture at large? Does its owner have an obligation to nurture each side of the game, whether or not it jibes with the prosaic nature of the toy industry or boosts profits? Do history and intellect matter? I spoke recently with Hasbro’s chief marketing officer, John Frascotti. He said the right things about Scrabble’s past and its competitive side. Hasbro is “committed to spending marketing dollars to promote the Scrabble brand and to promote Scrabble play,” Mr. Frascotti said. He told me he believed the company could do what the Scrabble association did, at least for schools and casual players. “Judge us as we act, not as we say,” he said. I promised to keep an open mind. But since I started playing competitively and reporting on Scrabble 15 years ago, I’ve shaken hands with a moving walkway of Hasbro executives, all of whom have pledged love for and commitment to the game. And then the cuts came. Hasbro recently withdrew its last, token contribution to the national championship: $15,000 in prize money. The winner of the tournament in Las Vegas will still be paid $10,000. After the company pulled the plug on them in 2008, competitive players formed their own governing body, the North American Scrabble Players Association, and, thanks to higher dues and participation fees, the tournament circuit has kept humming. If Hasbro does the same with School Scrabble — Mr. Frascotti said it wouldn’t — I’ll help find a way for my 11-year-old daughter and other young devotees to compete for a title in an educational game that they adore. Hasbro knows that we players will volunteer to do what it had paid others to do for it: support a culture that doesn’t necessarily fit in an earnings-driven world of fad toys and movie tie-ins. Maybe that’s smart business. But with ownership comes responsibility, and sometimes even a little altruism. Stefan Fatsis is the author of “Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players.” A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 14, 2013, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: Scrabbling Over Scrabble.
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 21:36:21 +0000