Scrabbling the Rules

I don't play a lot of Scrabble. This is due mainly to my inability to spell. So I was only mildly amused when I saw Stephen Colbert's spoof on Scrabble changing the "rules" in new editions. Apparently, the new rules will allow for proper names, nouns, etc. The goal, as Colbert's precise journalism explained it, was to enable the game to be better played by younger people.

This morning's local newspaper also features a story on this seemingly growing crisis. This article focused on the outrage spreading across the internet about this blasphemy. New rules!? For Scrabble? How dare they?

Speaking personally, there seem to be very few times when I have played a game that the rules mattered much at all. There was that time when Jamie, before she knew how to read, made a move in Candy Land which was "against the rules". When I questioned her about it she picked up the instructions, held them were I could not see them, and "read" where her move was legal.

There was the time I was playing monopoly with my son and he announced his plan to own the entire side of the board that contained green properties and the two jewels. He accomplished his task, amazingly, during my one short trip to the bathroom.

Now I know, there is a difference between "cheating" and "new rules". And we do discourage cheating, of course. But it is inevitable within social discourse that rules will be negotiable, and as long as the power balance is maintained, or the more powerful willing to relinquish power (as the adult does when letting the child play "by other rules") then such rules adjustment can help insure not just fairness, but justice. Rules serve, generally, to provide the framework for playing. For the game to have meaning, there have to be some boundaries set up. And of course those boundaries are pliable, either by mutual consent (preferable) or by autonomous decision (not preferable).

You and I both know, for more than 50 years, around dinner tables in America, parents have let their children play names, cities, etc. in Scrabble. Perhaps the rare parent has said, sternly, "No--that is against the rules!! You may not play Mickey Mouse!!!!!!"

But then those parents are no fun anyway.

Rules, they say, are meant to be broken. Or, more precisely, rules were made for human beings, not human beings for the rules. And in terms of the great social questions of the larger society, the same "rule" applies.