Month: August 2008

Troll bridges

When I first started reading this New York Times investigation into the psychology of Internet trolls, I thought maybe it was no more complicated than that some people are insensitive jerks. Now I think maybe some of them are genuine sociopaths, too.

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?

One promising answer comes from the computer scientist Jon Postel, now known as “god of the Internet” for the influence he exercised over the emerging network. In 1981, he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.” Originally intended to foster “interoperability,” the ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another, Postel’s Law is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a robust global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to write code that could “speak” as clearly as possible yet “listen” to the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance — the spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you.

I don’t want to believe

No, seriously, I should just stop reading the Sci Fi Weekly letters to the editor. No good ever comes of it.

You know, he almost seemed to be making a reasonable argument at the beginning, but then the overblown prose and mad hyperbole kicked in. For the record, allowing someone with only a passing acquaintance with The X-Files television show to review the new movie is not “like trusting your favorite child with a pedophile.”

How can I word this?

The more I play Wordscraper, the less I like it. It’s not just the many bugs or the overall ugly look of the thing. They claim to be working on at least the former of these two problems, and I have no reason to doubt them. (Their current timetable, on the other hand…? I don’t know, but I saw plenty of promised deadlines pass without bugs getting fixed when the application was called Scrabulous, so I won’t hold my breath. I’ll be surprised if everything that’s wrong with it is fixed by the end of today, like they’ve said.)

The thing that I keep coming back to, as I play a few more games, is that it’s just not as much fun. Ultimately, I can’t shake the opinion that Wordscaper is little more than a poor substitute for Scrabble, and that whatever supposed innovations its designers have brought to it have actually made the game less playable and more confusing. I know there are workarounds to making the board and gameplay more like traditional Scrabble, but I don’t really want workarounds. I want a fun and simple word game. Scrabble is that in spades; Wordscaper just isn’t.

And then, more importantly, there’s the problem of Hasbro — who, although they’re being portrayed as the villain in all of this, was actually in the right from the very beginning. Yes, there were lots of Scrabulous users (myself included) who were very upset when the application was shut down. And Hasbro’s own official Facebook application needs serious work. But I think they’ve handled this very well — at least as well as they could have under the circumstances — and I’d much prefer to throw my support behind them than the Agarwalla brothers. The more I read about all of this, the more I side with Ian Betteridge, who wonders, “Why should I support people who steal other people’s original ideas, then demand a ransom to sell those ideas back to their originators?” He goes on to say:

To put it another way: suppose the situation was reversed? Suppose that Joseph [Jaffe] invented a board game, and that Hasbro then slavishly copied it [and] launched a Facebook version before he launched his own? Would he be happy if he had to pay Hasbro to buy back what’s essentially his own game? Of course not. People are being blinded by the fact that it’s a big company defending its game against a tiny one. And everyone supports the little guy, right?

Not in this case. If you support originality, and want to see more good original work, don’t support rip-offs.

And in the comments to Jaffe’s post, he makes this interesting point:

While I don’t think the Argawallas were Machieavellean con-artists, it’s pretty naive to see them as just “two talented programmers who love Scrabble”.If they were doing it out of love, I’m sure they’d simply hand over the game to Hasbro, maybe in return for jobs. I haven’t read anything which suggested they made such an offer.

And to make the point again: Where does it stop? At what point does Hasbro, which owns tonnes of games, stop paying out cash to people ripping them off?

Which is a question that nobody seems to want to ask, much less answer. Even some of those who acknowledge that Hasbro had a legal right to sue the Argawallas and shut down Scrabulous are now calling for a boycott of Hasbro products. I feel like the lone spoilsport at the table, the big meany who’s siding with big business, but everything I’ve seen and read suggests that Hasbro was in the right.