This is an inked creature design by Darren Ward. We’re considering giving this guy a pair of legs to replace his spectral booty, and maybe reducing him to only two eyes. In combat, he’ll probably petrify your letter tiles. Stone tiles can’t be swapped – you have to either build a word around them to eliminate them, or use a “thaw” power-up.

Word.

We’re making a really cool graphic adventure / word puzzle mash-up called Spellirium. It totally kicks ass, and it has an amazing post-apocalyptic “trashpunk” aesthetic that looks like this:

Do you want to play this game? Do you want to play this game on Steam?

Untold Entertainment has its first-ever meeting with Steam two weeks from now at GDC (the Game Developers’ conference) and to be honest, we don’t want to blow it. We’re nervous that Steam is going to take one look at our 31 Facebook Likes and 18 Twitter followers and think “hmm … this game that looks like it’s made from garbage is also going to sell like garbage.”

i’d love to get these follower numbers up to a level where the nice folks at Steam are gonna say “Hey! People are actually interested in this game! We’d like to distribute it on our platform.”

Are you interested in Spellirium? Do you realize it’s going to be the greatest graphic adventure/word puzzle hybrid game you’ve ever played? Please help us out:

1. Like Spellirium on Facebook!
2. Follow Spellirium on Twitter!

In return, we’ll roll out a whole development plan to keep you updated on how we’re doing, including special glimpses at character artwork, concepts, background designs, scripts, storyboards, and secrets about Spellirium.

If you want to know more about the game, ask me about it! i’ll answer all of your questions in the comments section, and have posted more detail below. Thanks SO MUCH for your support! We’re working very, very hard to make Spellirium a great game that you’ll enjoy.

- Ryan Henson Creighton
President and Founder of Untold Entertainment Inc.
(and the guy who’s going to delete this post before Steam sees it

More About Spellirium – Read Ahead Only if You Care!

Q: How do the graphic adventure and word puzzle bits interact?

A: Instead of throwing a lot of item-based puzzles at you, Spellirium gives you a Boggle-like grid of letters on the right side of the screen. On the left, you see an enemy or a challenge that you have to solve by spelling words. Every challenge has a different solution.

Sometimes, you might have to make words with certain coloured tiles (GREEN words defeat the green creature). Or in certain directions (spell a word from left to right to move a character from left to right in a maze). Or maybe the words themselves matter (spell FIRE, FLAMES or INFERNO to torch something). Sometimes, you’re not allowed to move the tiles around, and you have to make words based on what the grid gives you. Other times, you may have to make words with double letters (to defeat twin creatures), or spell palindromes (to defeat a two-headed foe), or find rhyming words (to crack the code on riddle etched in a mysterious stone).

You’ll walk around beautifully-drawn scenes, just like in a graphic adventure game. The game has a great story. You talk to characters, pick up items, and travel around the map … but every significant interaction boils down to a neat puzzle-within-a-puzzle where you spell words to succeed.

Q:So it’s educational, right? It’s a game for kids?

A:Well, kids don’t really enjoy word games very much. And there’s a difference between a game that’s educational because it teaches you something, and a game like Spellirium that requires you to be educated to really enjoy it. If you liked the idea of a mash-up game like Puzzle Quest, but grew tired after your 8000th game of match-3, you’ll like the variety that Spellirium offers. It’s a great game for old-school graphic adventure fans, and for people who enjoy games like Scrabble, Boggle, Words with Friends, Scramble, Text Twist, Wurdle, Spelltower, Scrabulous, Bookworm Adventure, and Puzzlejuice. If you like doing the newspaper crossword, or if you like games that demand more from your brain than from your muscles, you’ll rather enjoy Spellirium.

Q:You mentioned a great story? i’ve heard that claim before.

A:So have we! In fact, we’re so disillusioned by lacklustre game stories that we set out to write one that doesn’t suck. Here it is:

Spellirium takes place in the future, after a mysterious apocalyptic event that left the world buried. The survivors can have “modern” technology, as long as they can dig it up … but with no gas, electricity, or enriched uranium, they can’t do much with what they find. So they build houses with it. They use cars as walls, and satellite dishes as spittoons. This gives the game its neat-o “trashpunk” aesthetic, and it’s why parts of the world look like they’re medieval. The survivors have been busted back to the Dark Ages.

Their biggest problem is that all forms of reading and writing are outlawed. If you dig something up with writing on it, you have to scrape/scratch/burn the letters off, or your findage will be confiscated and you’ll be put to death. You can’t write on anything, or even invent a new form of writing. You can’t even communicate with pictograms, because that’s a form of writing. So the people are technologically poor, and bound to stay that way.

You play a young tailor named Todd who’s holed up in a cloistered community with four men who call themselves the “Runekeepers” – a secret society that curates an underground library filled with junk with writing on it. When the Runekeepers leave on a mysterious mission and one of them turns up dead, Todd discovers a mysterious device that affects reality when he uses it to spell words. Todd teams up with an oddball clan of adventurers including a big blue monster, a hard-edged hunter, and a foppish bard. Together, they set out to find the missing Runekeepers and to save them from danger.

Q: Sounds pretty serious?

A: Humour is a hallmark of everything we do at Untold Entertainment. Spellirium is wry and witty. Just as the Monkey Island series is very dark thematically and graphically but is betrayed by a great sense of humour, Spellirium is similarly a dark fantasy game infused with sly, winking writing.

Q: This is your big chance. Anything else i should know about?
A: Spellirium is a feature-rich game with a lot of wild ideas. Here’s a feature list of stuff we haven’t talked much about (but we will on the Facebook/Twitter accounts that you’re about to click on!

• build, collect and track over fifty thousand words in an unlockable Dictionary
• gather non-biodegradable landfill items and craft them into power-ups
• buy new items using collected words as your currency
• battle a variety of creatures, and store their info in your Bestiary
• scavenge different items from creatures by bribing, scaring, or defeating them
• learn special spells like ZAP and DELUGE to electrify or drown your enemies
• share your best words on Twitter, and add your Twitter pals’ words to your Dictionary
• discover the shocking secret that holds the Land in thrall

Q: Where’s the trailer?

A: We’re building out the story as we go – “shooting in sequence”, as the film term goes. That means we don’t have enough footage to make it appear as though the game takes place beyond the same three locations! We’re also trying to get the rights to a certain song to use in the trailer.

In the meantime, we have a few short, soundless video clips. This is probably the most informative one:

Thanks SO MUCH for all your support! We’re looking forward to showing you tons of great new stuff about Spellirim, and we hope you like us enough to make an impression on the folks at Steam!

1. Like Spellirium on Facebook!
2. Follow Spellirium on Twitter!

Word.

i can’t find the photo, but i scoured the internet for the closest thing to it:

It was E3 circa 2003, during the little-known GDC-like conference portion of the event. Shamelessly geeking out by taking pictures with your long-time game design heroes was NOT the order of the day, but friends … i just couldn’t help myself. If you’ve seen pictures of the Untold Entertainment offices, you’ll know it’s a veritable shrine to the glory days of LucasArts graphic adventure games, back when story and character development and humour ruled the day (in stark contrast to today, when all three of those elements are routinely botched and butchered – almost deliberately, it sometimes seems).

Before i accosted Tim, he was on a panel talking about the difficulty of financing video games in his new venture, Double Fine. This was pre-Psychonauts. i asked him a question from the gallery: “The graphic adventure genre had clearly tanked, and action games ruled the day. But if you look at the free-to-play Flash game ecosystem, you’ll see a lot of young designers creating graphic adventure games, and they’re quite popular with a certain niche. Would you ever consider building another one?”

Tim screwed up his face in thought. i paraphrase: “I … yeah, I’ve seen that. Those little adventure games are great. And it’s tempting, but … I think we need to move on from that genre, and do something different. We can make games with graphic adventure-like elements, like character dialogue and picking up items, but as for those old-school adventure games, i … i don’t think we can go back.”

Tim Goes Back

On Wednesday February 8 2012, Tim went back. Double Fine Productions launched a Kickstarter project asking for $400k to produce an old-school graphic adventure game and a making-of documentary, with creative involvement from Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert. In 2 hours, the project had crossed the $100k mark, and Tim remarked on Twitter that that was more than the budget of the original Secret of Monkey Island. In just under 12 hours, donated funding had shot up past $500k: half a million bucks in good will and high hopes, built on a legacy of some of the most enjoyable and fondly-remembered moments in video game history.

These games, friends – these games are why i am in the industry today. The graphic adventure genre is far from dead, and i hope this groundbreaking experiment proves it. It’s a great comfort to me to see these guys pump life and attention and revival into the genre, even as we work to release Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure on new platforms, and toil away on Spellirium, our trashpunk graphic adventure/word puzzle game mash-up.

Fame = Money. Who Knew?

But what does this all actually mean? Have Double Fine proven that the standard publishing model for funding video games is dead and buried? It’s certainly coughing its death rattle, but i don’t think that’s the take-away here.

Is it that graphic adventure games are alive and well, and that we’re going to see a huge resurgence in the genre? Selfishly, i hope so. But the fact remains that the problems that sunk the genre to begin with are still present: lack of replayability, high cost of development for content players can chew through in a chicken minute, pixel hunting, nonsensical puzzle design, verbosity, randomly rubbing items together in the hopes of discovering a solution, and just plain ol’ getting stuck with no hope of moving the game forward. Imagine if, in a first-person shooter, your gun jammed, and you couldn’t keep killing Nazis unless you learned how to take your whole rifle apart and put it back together, which inexplicably required some knowledge of colour theory. That’s what we’re dealing with.

i think the take-away here is that the video games industry has honest-to-goodness celebrities, and that we will pay those celebrities money to build games for us. It’s the dawning of a new age during which the video games studio system, a la the Hollywood studio system, is finally born, and personality becomes a business model. Here’s a short list of personalities and games that i would personally help fund:

• Rand Miller, creator of MYST, and one of the other heroes i accosted at E3 2003. Go create a Kickstarter and create a new IP, and i will give you my money.
• Cliff Johnson. Your game The Fool’s Errand was awesome, and it made me feel smart whenever i solved one of your puzzles. You’ve been accepting pre-orders for the sequel, A Fool and His Money, since 2003, presumably to help you fund the game. You say you’re launching September of this year, but Wikipedia maintains a chart of your scheduling slips, and it’s embarrassing. What’s the problem, Cliff? Money? If so, then i think we’ve found your solution.
• Ken and Roberta Williams. Come out of retirement and do something non-King’s Quest-related. i’ll toss you some dough.
• Jane Jensen. Old Man Murray blames Gabriel Knight 3 for sounding the graphic adventure games death knell. Why not work on a fourth adventure, with help on game and puzzle design from someone else, while you take care of the story, characters and atmosphere that you write so well? (Check out Jane’s Gray Matter to see what she’s been up to lately)
• Brian Moriarty. You’re teaching at Worcester Polytechnic, and from the brief response to the fan email i sent you a year ago, it seems like you feel your game development days are over? LOOM was a major influence on Spellirium, and it shows – from the robed protagonist, to the post-apocalyptic-but-it-looks-medieval setting, to the weaving and shearing puzzles (i actually made my hero a tailor, in honour of LOOM). LOOM ended on a down note. It was supposed to be a trilogy, taking us through the Guild of Shepherds and the Guild of Blacksmiths in the next two installments. Go build a Kickstarter project. Buy the sequel rights from LucasArts, and MAKE ME MAH GAMES.
• Ron Gilbert. You left us with one Hell of a cliffhanger with Monkey Island 2, before the franchise went in a different direction without you. How much money do you think it would cost to wrest the MI rights from TellTale, treat Monkey Island 3 and every game thereafter like Guybrush Threepwood’s fever dream, and built a direct sequel to your game? Put that amount of money on your Kickstarter project, and witness how much fans will pay to discover the real secret of Monkey Island.

Game designers are my celebrities. i’m far more interested in the work of Al Lowe, Jordan Mechner or Eric Chahi than i am in Michael Bay, Charlie Kaufman or Steven Spielberg (The Dig/Boom Blox notwithstanding). And just as Joe Public will pay money for tabloids full of photos of their favourite celebrities, will pay to see their movies, will pay to buy their clothing lines, i will pay you to build games for me.

Who are your game design heroes? What do you want them to create for you, and how much will you pay? Thanks to Double Fine blazing the trail, you may well get your wish.

Here are the FACTS that i’ve learned about game pricing:

If your game has a broad appeal, you can charge a relatively small amount of money for it and hope to make it up in volume.

If your game appeals to a small group of people – and, i mean, it REALLY appeals to that small group of people – you can charge a higher price, to make up for lost sales to everyone else, and to capitalize on your audience’s undying love of whatever.

Angry Birds? 99 cents. Sean O’Brien: Pro Windsurfer? Ten dollars.

So here i am developing Spellirium. It’s a graphic adventure game, in the style of those LucasArts/Sierra Online games from the 90′s, that have been relegated to a very narrow corner of niche gamedom – nestled in-between train simulators and Japanese child-rearing games.

But more than that, Spellirium is an experimental mash-up – a graphic adventure game mixed with a word puzzle game. It’s LOOM meets Boggle. Niche meets niche. Narrow audience carved down to an even more narrow audience. It’s like building a train simulator where you raise your train to be a little lady.

Born 2 Spell

So this game, on paper, is very very niche. Like many indies do, i’m making the game that i would want to play. You see, i grew up doing crossword puzzles. At eight years old, when other boys were thumbing through their dads’ copies of Oui, i was floundering through PennyPress variety magazines, trying to solve the Fill-Its. Other boys knew they had come of age when they finally beat up their old man after he lost the family car in a drunken poker game. My big coup was finally beating my mom at Scrabble.

i ran into a lot of trouble when i presented this game to the Casual crowd in Seattle. The most common reaction i received was that Spellirium was “too smart” for the middle-aged mom audience that Casual catered to. This was a huge blow, because the game was originally designed for that exact crowd, with nods to the dark fantasy that nerdy moms love.

i learned quickly that my biggest challenge with Spellirium would not be building the game, but marketing it. How would i find the niche audience that would adore the game, and pay a little more money for it than usual because it so suited their needs?

My first attempt was to build a web game portal packed with word games, which i called Word Game World – the idea being that i could learn from the hundreds of other word games out there, meet and talk to my audience, and most importantly, control the ad inventory so i could push that audience to Spellirium. My plan failed when marketing Word Game World became as big a marketing challenge as marketing Spellirium ever was.

This all led me to face some tough questions. Chief among them: did i overestimate the word game market? Is the group of players who will enjoy my game really too small to support the cost of developing it?

The success of Scrabulous, Words with Friends, Text Twist, and the critical success of indie games SpellTower, PuzzleJuice and Wurdle seem to suggest otherwise. i was even wrong about Bookworm Adventures, Spellirium’s kissing cousin and the game upon which this entire project was predicated. When the Casual crowd told me that word games didn’t “do well”, i thought for sure they were pointing to Bookworm Adventures, with its astronomical $700k budget, as a financial failure.

But get this: i learned recently that Bookworm Adventures has had two sequels. Generally, the existence of sequels indicates the financial success of the original, or at least projected financial success of future installments.

But What If i’m Dumb?

Before Spellirium was playable and i’d describe the game to people, common objections included:

• What if i don’t know what words to make?
• i’m bad at spelling.
• i’m slow at making words.
• How do you (or i) know there are any valid words in the grid?
• Longest words are best words, right?
• What if you just can’t make a word?

Based on these fears, i’ve made a LOT of concessions in gameplay to cater to a crowd that wouldn’t really consider playing word games, and that doesn’t count “word game” as a preferred genre.

Q: What if i don’t know what words to make?
A: There are two features – the Dictionary and the Quicklist – that mitigate this. The Dictionary stores all the words in the game. You can add words from the Dictionary on to your Quicklist, which hangs off the side of the grid while you’re playing. This way, Spellirium becomes sort of a build-your-own-word-search. And of all the activities in the Pantheon of Word Games, even the (self-described) dumbest players can complete a word search.

Q: i’m bad at spelling.
A: In an early Spellirum challenge, you have to shear a sheep by spelling words that have to do with cutting: SHEAR, CUT, CHOP, CLIP, TRIM, etc. i’ve only completed five playtests, but 2/5 players have spelled “SHEER”, a homonym for “SHEAR”. And they were confused when it didn’t work.

This led one tester to suggest i modify the game so that when you lasso a group of letters (like “BAED”), the game anagrams it until it finds a valid word in the Dictionary (“BEAD” or “BADE”). So it doesn’t matter whether you can spell or not -if you know there’s a valid word in the letters you lassoed, the game will accept the letters.

Q: i’m slow at making words.
A: This was a very early concession i knew i’d have to make. Many players hated the time pressure in the game, so i modified Spellirium to be turn-based. The Spellcaster has a “health bar” at the top. Whenever you swap letter tiles, your health goes down. The farther apart the letter tiles are, the more health you lose when you swap them. Guessing at bogus words also dings your bar. This turns Spellirium into a much more methodical, strategic game, and the time pressure has been removed completely.

Q: How do you (or i) know there are any valid words in the grid?
A: Obviously, this is a question that only non-word-game-players would ever ask. A few people have suggested that i run an algorithm in the game to highlight a valid word if a player can’t find one, much the same way that Bejeweled highlights a valid match after a few seconds of inactivity have elapsed.

Here’s the deal: the grid is 7×7 tiles, and it uses a Scrabble-like distribution, favouring common letters (RSTLNEAIOU etc – all the 1-point tiles in Scrabble). So essentially, you’re starting at a 49-letter anagram puzzle. If you can’t make a single 3-8-letter word given FORTY-NINE TILES, there’s really not much i can do for you. Go play Gears of War, and stop wasting my precious oxygen.

Q: Longest words are best words, right?
A: Here’s another classic objection from non-word-game-players. This one is so pervasive that even the creators of PuzzleJuice conceded and make longer words worth more points. As any proper Scrabble player knows, certain words are more difficult to make than others. “MUCH” is a higher-value word than “ROOSTER”, because the letters “M”, “C” and “H” are found in fewer English words than more common letters like the ones that comprise “ROOSTER”.

But in his GDC 2011 keynote, Sid Meier revealed that if the odds were 60/40 that a player would win a given battle, and the player lost that battle, the player would complain. “i had more guys”, the player would say. Mathematically, it made sense. Mathematically, the player should lose 4/10 times. But it felt unfair to the player.

Likewise, most players don’t care a fig for letter distribution and probabilities. To them, it takes more mental effort to make a long word than a short one – Z’s and Q’s be damned. Even worse, many players feel that the more obscure a word is, the more points it should be worth. So PARSONS, which is an odd and somewhat outdated word, should be worth more points than the more common word PUNCH. But in Scrabble scoring, PARSONS is worth 9 points, while PUNCH is worth 10 points (P3 + A1 + R1 + S1 + O1 + N1 + S1 = 9 vs P3 + U1 + N1 + C3 + H2 = 10).

Logistically, it would be very very difficult to award the player extra points for “obscure” or “clever” words. “Clever” words, really, are the ones you can spell using as many high-value letters as possible (think “BUZZ”, “QUENCH”, and “JAVA”). But the people – and i mean the E for Everyone people – want long words to trump challenging letter combination.

Q: What if you just can’t make a word?
A: i really bristle at this. It’s like if i were building a first-person shooter, and i had a lot of non-FPS fans asking me “what if i can’t shoot a guy?” There’s no such thing as not shooting a guy in an FPS. You SHOOT GUYS in an FPS. That’s what you do. That’s like asking “what if i can’t jump?” in a Mario platformer,
or “what if i can’t make car go?” in a racing game. Spellirium is about MAKING WORDS. You MAKE WORDS. What if you can’t make a word? There’s NO SUCH THING. That’s what you DO in this GAME.

i’m Down On My Niche

(Note: that heading doesn’t make a lot of sense if you pronounce it “nitch” .. but if you pronounce it “nitch”, living does not make a lot of sense, so please go directly to the nearest suiciditorium and kill yourself. Thanks kindly.)

As of now, i’ve only ever tested the game with non-word-game-players. i love them all dearly, and i don’t want them to be offended, but for the sake of this article, i’m going to call them the dumb players (in the same way that someone who doesn’t know how to strafe in an FPS, or how to handbrake-turn in a racing game, is “dumb”). The dumb players are not the target audience.

i was concerned because the game ground to a halt at the sheep challenge when the “dumb” players played. Many of them couldn’t think of enough synonyms for “CUT”. This led me to make the biggest and most controversial gameplay concession of all: you can’t lose If you play the game and can’t pass it for lack of ability, your energy eventually runs down and you win anyway. This is based on something i heard one of the Casual folks say at GDC many years ago, while advocating for women gamers: “If you buy a video game and you can’t access ALL of the content on that disc, go ask for your money back.” So in Spellirium, you’re never “stuck”. You can always proceed through the game, see all the story bits, and play through all the challenges – even if you fail at them.

A Word From the Wise

i’ve had one lengthy email conversation with a die-hard word game fan. In stark contrast to “i can’t think of any words that mean ‘cut’” and “that’s how you spell ‘SHEER’, right?”, here’s what the target audience wants:

if the challenges are a little more difficult than three- and four-letter words for SHEAR, then it could be a new adventure for traditional logophiles (like myself).

Say, something like… “Save the equines by naming all of the varieties”… HORSE, ZEBRA, COLT, DONKEY, ZEBRASS, JACKASS, CAYUSE, EQUID, ZEBRINE, NEDDY, ZEBROID, BRUMBY, ASS, MOKE, BURRO, CUDDY, JENNY, AIVER, FILLY, etc. Or maybe instead of shearing a sheep in a hurry, you can say “Save the sheep from getting sheared by giving up all of its buddies”… BUCK, DAM, EWE, RAM, HOGG, HOGGET, WETHER, LAMB, MULE, TEG, TUP, DOWNS, SLINK, BELL, SHEARLING, etc.

The “dumb” players, after trying Spellirium, have all said to me “gee … i didn’t think i would enjoy that, but it’s quite fun, and i don’t usually like word games.” So there’s a small victory. But when the game is out in the wild with only its trailer and my under-funded marketing strategy to support it, how am i going to get non-word-game-players to even pick it up and try it? One glimpse of those letter tiles, and they’ll be headed for the hills.

i’m at a crossroads. Do i:

1. Continue to make concessions to “dumb” players and make Spellirium playable by Everyone, and then risk “dumb” players not even bothering to try the game because it doesn’t LOOK like the kind of thing they’d enjoy
2. Go hardcore and court the logophiles, making the game challenging and interesting (as above), and then risk not finding nearly enough hardcore wordies to buy the game and help me break even
3. Strike some kind of balance. And what IS that balance?

i leave it to you, dear readers! Please help me figure this one out, and clarify your stance in the Comments section!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
Word.

The Hunter is unique, because she has TWO different abilities, and this is her back-up one. We won’t reveal her primary ability until later, but just like everything in Spellirium, it’s totally cool.

What do you think it could be??

Word.

Here’s an early production example of what we call a “word quality” challenge: spell words that have to do with cutting in order to shear a sheep.

Word.

First up is a little snippet from very early in the game. It’s early yet, so there’s no sound. Note that we’re following the writing rule “always put a body on page one.”

We’ll be posting a few clips of word-making gameplay and the Companion System later in the week.

Word.

1. It’s one letter short of a 50-point BINGO (Scrabble’s point bonus for using all your letters).
2. You may not reach one of the bonus tiles with it (most notably Triple Word Score).
3. The letters in “TETHER” are all low-value, worth one point apiece.
4. With a sprawling crossword, you’re opening up a LOT of options for your opponent to exploit.

Often in Scrabble, it’s the tiny, well-placed words that win the day, enabling you to re-score two additional words that are already on the board via clever linking.

A Word of a Different Colour

The same goes for Spellirium. Spelling a 7-letter word is fine, but if you want to send your score into the stratosphere, you need to make solidly-coloured words.

Here’s how the combo/chain system works:

Big scores are extremely important for dominating your friends and showing off your superior vocabulary and intellect. In Story Mode, you’ll need these points in order to craft power-ups. More on power-ups in a future post.

Word.

That’s why it’s so rewarding to stand on the far shore and gaze back across that tumultuous ocean. Here are some screenshots illustrating how Spellirium began, and how far it’s come.

Word.

It’s really frustrating when you make a word in a game, and it’s not recognized by the game’s dictionary. It’s the worst when the word is a perfectly natural English word like “PUCE”, but a game like Jumbline doesn’t accept it. (Hear that, Jumbline devs? Ahem. AHEM.)

But in other situations, you punch in words like “bazooms” with a childish grin on your face, and when the game doesn’t recognize it, you click your tongue in mock outrage.

Triple Word Score for “BLEEP”

The Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary prides itself on being the most complete and fair collection of words suitable for tournament play, but it ran up against some controversy when a player complained about the listing of non-capitalized “jew” as a verb, with the accompanying definition “to bargain with – an offensive term”. The Jewish Defamation League got involved, and the next version of the OSPD removed the offending word, along with a big list of other words for good measure, including (but not limited to):

• boobie
• cunt
• faggoty
• the almighty fuck
• fubar
• hebe
• jesuit (i’m really not sure why? Unless there’s a pejorative verb form, as with “jew” … ?)
• nookie
• poo
• wetback

The Seattle SCRABBLE® Club has a complete list of expurgated words in case you’re up for a giggle or gasp.

When the neutered list was released, the players revolted, many of them upset at not having been consulted. There were threats of event boycotting and … rioting? i dunno. What do Scrabble players do when they’re enraged? Spell “GRR”?

Caving to the pressure, the Scrabbleati released an unexpurgated Official Tournament and Club Word List.

Somebody Set Us Up the F-Bomb

All this to say, i’m at a point now where i’m considering the word list for Spellirium, and whether or not it should contain naughties. As i’ve said before, the game is not necessarily for kids, so we can take “WILL SOMEONE CONSIDER THE CHILDREN??” handily out of the equation.

The difference between Spellirium and Scrabble is that while you have the option to spell various words in Scrabble, Spellirium may actually require you to spell certain words. For example, you may come to a point in the game where you meet a character who won’t let you pass unless you’ve spelled every word beginning with “Q”. i think this makes a big difference in deciding whether or not to include certain words on the list. When the word list is all up in your bidness, i don’t want to force a player to spell a word he is uncomfortable spelling.

Degrees of Depravity

We can sort the expurgated words into these general categories:

1. Swears
2. Euphemisms for swears
3. Racist/Prejudiced terms
4. Puerile words for body functions/parts (impolite words that mostly kids would use)
5. Crass words for body functions (impolite words that mostly adults would use)

So we could go a number of different ways with Spellirium. We could include these words, and complaints be damned. We could, as some have suggested, give the player an optional switch to flip that’s off by default – when you turn it on, you get the complete word list. And the “complete” word list could be everything but swears and racism, everything but racism, or even plain old everything … (but i have a gut feeling that of any of the words on the list, most people are most likely to take most offense at the racist/prejudiced stuff).

What do YOU think? Should we include a content switch? Should we include all the naughty words, or just some of them?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

When you answer, imagine yourself playing Spellirium, making one of these words, and reacting when the game does (or doesn’t) acknowledge it. And imagine your reaction if the game required you to make one or all of the words on the list.

Thanks, everyone!

Word.