Board games from the city of Vijayanagara (Hampi ... - Gioco dell'Oca.

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Mattel, more than twenty-five years of the Players, Inc. publication, now called Scrabble
News, to “fill in blanks” in the history of tournament play, popular press articles on living
room and tournament Scrabble culture, many works on word play and lexicography,
and a handful of scientific volumes: K. Anders Ericsson, ed., The Road to Excellence: The
Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games (Mahwah,
N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), David Levy, Chess and Computers (Potomac,
Mo.: Computer Science Press, 1976), and Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel, Memory:
From Mind to Molecules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999). Sports and
sport-like games are probably just as important to Fatsis’s preparation, in works like
Alexander Cockburn’s controversial essay on obsession among chessmasters, Idle Passion:
Chess and the Dance of Death (New York: Village Voice/Simon and Schuster, 1974),
which Fatsis cites (p. 296), David Spanier’s more even-handed account of chess as sport,
Total Chess (New York: Dutton, 1984), which Fatsis does not cite, the classic Paper Lion,
and Fatsis’s own Wild and Outside: How a Renegade Minor League Revived the Spirit of
Baseball in America’s Heartland (New York: Walker & Co., 1995). Susan Orlean’s recent
acclaimed report of obsession among Florida orchid fanciers, The Orchid Thief (New
York: Random House, 1998), in superimposing moral questions onto a technical superstructure
that is in turn embedded in a firsthand narrative, most resembles the book
that Fatsis has wanted to write. (Though Orlean was never hooked on orchids.)
Aside from board wargames, miniatures wargames, and role-playing games, only a
handful of proprietary games have ever enjoyed anything like a “technical” (American)
literature: Teeko (by John Scarne), Camelot, Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, Diplomacy,
Othello, Mastermind, Icehouse, and maybe a few others, though websites are multiplying
that number many times. Much of the Scrabble technique that Fatsis liberally distributes
throughout the text he has borrowed from three newsletters from the 1990s –
Nick Ballard’s Medleys, Jim Geary’s JG Newsletter, and Brian Sheppard’s Rack Your Brain,
from a host of small-press and self-published word lists, and from the two best American
how-to books: Joel Wapnick’s 1986 The Champion’s Strategy for Winning at Scrabble
Brand Crossword Game, now available as the CD-ROM, A Champion’s Strategies
(Montreal: Joel Wapnick, 1999), and Joe Edley’s and John D. Williams Jr.’s Everything
Scrabble (New York: Pocket Books, 1994).
But if Scrabble were just another “packaged” game, as Fatsis calls it (p. 23), it would
be incapable of sustaining the moral and emotional weight the author wants to lay on
it. A trademark is almost a metaphysical barrier: “Scrabble isn’t like any of the other
thinking-person’s board games, for one reason: Someone owns it. Chess and backgammon,
which have been played and studied for centuries, are non-proprietary. Anyone can
make a copy. As such, there’s a sort of theological purity about them, as if they were
handed down from the gods for humankind’s analysis and bemusement” (p. 22).
Scrabble seems tainted by the other, lesser games in the Hasbro line: “[I]t isn’t a board
game at all in the way that Clue or Monopoly is a board game, contrived, redundant, and
temporal, but rather a brilliant, organic, seemingly inevitable creation in the same way
as chess or backgammon or the Mona Lisa” (p. 178).
The most telling comparison is with sports: “Perfection isn’t arrived at overnight,