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The Story Of Doodle Jump: Brotherly Love And Digital Snacks Facebook word game fans rejoice! Scrabulous, pulled from Facebook only two days ago due to a lawsuit from Scrabble creators Hasbro, is now back up in the form of Wordscraper. The makers of Scrabulous have given the game some graphics and mechanics tweaking to help differentiate it from the Hasbro original. This is when we get to see if Hasbro’s lawsuit had any real merits. Will people stick with the reincarnated Scrabulous, or will they hop on over to Hasbro’s official Scrabble Facebook application, currently being enjoyed by over 50,000 players?
The real question here is “Why the hell are so many people wasting their entire day playing games on a social networking site?” How is anything getting done, anywhere? Scrabulous is Back! Its New Name is Wordscraper [Mashable via CNET]
Amid Hasbro’s lawsuit over the Scrabulous Facebook game, the social network has pulled the application, as it was asked to. Scrabulous users who log in are now greeted with the following message:
Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.
“Here” leads users to an email form where they can subscribe to receive updates on the app’s status.
The legal battle comes as Hasbro claims patent infringement on the game, right after the toy company, through its partnership with EA, launched its own, competing version of Scrabble for Facebook.
Hasbro is suing the creators of the popular Scrabulous Facebook game, after a request the toy company made to the social network earlier this year to pull the game went unanswered.
In January when Hasbro first began to fuss about Scrabulous, many were perplexed — wasn’t the prolific Facebook board game an homage to the original, arguably even a sort of viral marketing? But today’s infringement suit announcement comes just after Electronic Arts, through its partnership with Hasbro, launched its own official Scrabble game on Facebook, a launch no doubt complicated by the existence of an unlicenced, competing game.
Hasbro says Scrabulous infringes on its intellectual property rights, and is suing creators Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, while requesting that Facebook pull the application immediately.
Full announcement follows the jump.
Alex Galloway has put together a lovely digital adaptation of a chess-like game created by French Marxist Guy Debord dubbed Kriegspiel; now the estate of Debord is sending cease and desist letters to Galloway, claiming the digital version is infringing on the intellectual property rights of Debord. Reminiscent of the problem faced by the Scrabulous creators, Galloway is insisting that the idea of a game and rules are not subject to copyright. Ian Bogost weighs in:
