Nintendo DS Scrabble beats 8 year old using swears

Davey Winder
Saturday, 13 December 2008 15:44

Your IT - Entertainment

She thought it would help her eight year old with his vocabulary, but this mother was not expecting a game of Scrabble on the DS to expand his word knowledge quite so much.

The Daily Mail newspaper in the UK has a reputation as being something of an angry publication. usually it is venting that anger towards the direction of the government, illegal immigrants or high levels of crime and low levels of policing. You get the idea, I am sure.

Which is probably why an angry story about peaceful and nerdy Scrabble caught my eye this week.

It seems that Tonya Carrington bought her eight year old sone Ethan a game of Scrabble for the Nintendo DS console, with a view to helping him improve his vocabulary. Ethan immediately got down to playing against the cast of virtual opponents.

Of course, Scrabble players take the game very seriously and use any available words to win. A competitive streak that apparently stretches to virtual players as well.

First off the DS player used 'tits' which it defined as being a garden bird, although it did also admit it could be an informal world for a pair of breasts. OK, you could probably let that one slip. But when the DS also used sh*t, Mum started getting worried.

Next was 'toke' which is slang for drawing from a cannabis cigarette, but the best or worst was still to come.

To cap things off not so nicely, the game was won by Camilla the computer player triumphantly producing the word triple word scoring 'f*ckers' which it said was a slang word for chavs.

For everyone not resident in the UK, a chav is also a slang word for a kind of common council-estate criminal underclass youngster over here.

Of course, the Daily Mail went off on one as the DS Scrabble game carries a 3+ age rating. Of course, Ubisoft who publish the game were quick to point out that if Ethan had played the 'junior' game option then the swears would not have been used.

Still, it could have been worse. At least his DS console didn't try to kill him.