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- guardian.co.uk, Thursday August 28 2008 00.01 BST
- The Guardian, Thursday August 28 2008
It's the worst of times, it's the best of times to be writing a game that works just like a really well-known one. The travails of Scrabulous, the Scrabble (® ™ © and all that guff) playalike, have been well-documented: its meteoric rise to fame via the splendid timesink Facebook, the lawsuit by Mattel and Hasbro (which own the online rights but hadn't quite managed to get around to writing a version while Scrabulous began raking in the cash - reckoned to be thousands of dollars a month) and the diversion into a side road with Wordscraper, where you use round rather than square tiles. And Hasbro/Mattel have come up with an "official" version that everyone really, really hates. It's slow, it's advert-loaded, it's just corporate.
Meanwhile, over on the iPhone - whose success as a development platform surely has Steve Jobs rubbing his hands with glee - Noah Witherspoon, the maker of a Tetris-alike game called Tris, has removed it, under pressure from the Tetris company which - guess what - owns the rights to the real game. Tris was popular, free and fast to load. By contrast, says John Gruber, a well-versed commentator on the iPhone scene, "the official iPhone Tetris ... costs $10 and takes 30 seconds to launch".
Are you seeing a pattern here? Scrabble was, once upon a time, scrabbling around to capture attention, the product of a man trying to escape the grind of the Depression; his analysis of how often letters appear in a language, and the creation of the iconic grid of squares with their scores was, in hindsight, a masterstroke. Similarly Tetris, which emerged from the CPU-constrained Soviet Union, squeezed more addictive gameplay into fewer lines of code than anyone had imagined possible before.
But now those games are owned by big organisations which, as is typical, are hidebound by their size. Write a brisk little version of the game? Sure! But we just have to check with the marketing department first what colours we're using this year. And is the background meant to have Russian spires? Which version of the logo? Are we changing the logo? How often should it appear?
In the meantime, small developers run rings around them. The problem those small developers have is that they can't run rings around the law; and while the courts often grind slow, they grind exceedingly small.
The puzzle, though, is why the big companies think that their solutions are inherently better than the small developers? Lyndon Johnson, as US president, said in private of the FBI boss J Edgar Hoover - who he didn't entirely trust - that he'd rather have him in the tent pissing out than the alternative. It seems that there aren't any adept politicians in Hasbro, Mattel or Tetris; nor even EA, which could hire Witherspoon with ease and get all the benefit of his experience on the iPhone platform. (There's a suggestion that the reason this hasn't happened with Scrabulous is that the Agarwalla brothers are asking too much. In which case the lawsuit is, as I've speculated on the Technology blog simply a way for Hasbro and Mattel to get it cheaper.)
Again and again we can see that it's the small developers who do the interesting things: the Wordpress blog platform, even PHP (the web scripting language on which Wordpress blogging is built), and of course those games all kicked off as one-person efforts. While we can understand that the internet makes everyone level in some ways, by making all sites equally accessible, I think there's a lesson yet unlearned - that it gives the smaller organisations (perhaps just one person) a huge advantage over the big ones. Game on, you might say.
