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

122
B OARD G AME S TUDIES 6, 2003
and the more I play, the more Alfred’s game seems perfect. I think he was like Alexander
Cartwright’s Knickerbocker Base-Ball Club laying the bases ninety feet apart, or James
Naismith setting the height of his peach baskets at ten feet. The distances and locations
of the premium squares are just right. The game is a carefully choreographed pas de
deux, a delicate balance between risk and reward” (p. 98). Certainly the game is worthy
of the attention only athletes can give it. Even Butts’s exhaustive research into letter frequency
in major newspapers has the imprimatur of classic literature, having been
inspired by the code-breaking story, “The Gold Bug,” by Poe (pp. 92-93). Of course, we
are not allowed to forget that Butts still felt that words had meaning, whereas for most
good players today they are merely rules for laying tiles (p.40). Butts and his eventual
partner and financial backer James Brunot (who fiddled with the board, invented the
fifty-point bonus for using all the tiles on the rack in one turn, and coined the name
“Scrabble”) thought of the game as “only a game . . . something you’re supposed to
enjoy” (p. 104). But Fatsis decides that Butts is “really one of us” in that his letter research
was as meticulous and obsessive as the herculean word memorizing done by most of the
top players (p. 97). And anyway, the tournament game consistently displays all the marks
of a true sport: subculture (p. 12), tradition (p. 306), owners and players (p. 168), testosterone
(p. 300), obsession (p. 14), ambition (p. 199), practice (p. 310), sacrifice (p. 257),
organized events (p. 58), venues (p. 348), time constraints (p. 301), genius (p. 340),
luck (p. 358), vulgarities ( passim), blood (on the tiles from an accidental cut, p. 336),
heartbreak (p. 190), gracefulness (pp. 338-39), triumph (p. 283), celebrity (p. 243),
money (p. 13), statistics (pp. 128-29), and literature (pp. 368-70).
Instead of the traditional distinction between “mere games” and serious sports, or
even trivial (proprietary) games and serious (traditional) ones, Fatsis proposes the distinction
between a game played casually to pass the time and the same game exploited
for all its emotional and strategic depth. Even the ranks of tournament Scrabble players
are wildly divided among the novices, who “have no respect for the board” (p. 21), the
intermediates, who still include a large proportion of “blue-hairs,” or middle-aged
women who play the game for fun and schmoozing, and the upper stratum of experts,
who alone can play the “total game” – control their own tiles, deduce the tiles on their
opponent’s rack and still in the bag, and master board strategy – and so are completely
out of Fatsis’s league. “I’m technically an expert now. But I’ve never felt like a pro,”
according to Fatsis (p. 323). Master player Jim Geary is even more divisive: “To be honest,
the [National Scrabble Championship] is only Division I. Every other division is only
stamp collecting” (p. 322). Fatsis explains, “The rest of us are just hobbyists because
we’re not playing the game to its mathematical fullest, the only place where it possesses
analytical value” (p. 323, my italics). A point is reached, in other words, where quantitative
differences become qualitative, where another hundred ratings points change the
very nature of the game that one can play.
Yet Fatsis is ambivalent about the meaning of these distinctions, which varies from
mere numbers to social classes to moral judgments to meaningless abstractions. “[Is it]
only with near-complete word knowledge [that] the game [is] truly meaningful? . . .
[U]nlike Geary, I believe you can scale down the game to accommodate the incomplete