First it was the word "tits." The Nintendo Scrabble game offered the eight-year-old boy two definitions: a garden bird or an informal word for female breasts. A garden variety mistake? Not when you consider the game's next choice.
Ethan Carrington's handheld Nintendo DS spit out the word "f**kers" to win at Nintendo Scrabble - the f-bomb was worth a triple word score.
Before giving birth to my daughter, this would have cracked me up (OK, it still did, but I promise I shook my head in appropriate disgust while clutching my stomach). The rating on the game was for three and up, and well, I have a three-year-old now. So you'll excuse me my prudishness in agreeing with Tonya Carrington - this game has got to go. The English mother bought the game for her son because he enjoys English; she thought it would boost his vocabulary. Only she was thinking more Webster's, less salty sea sailor.
The thing is, he's probably heard the words on the bus. But in a game Mom and Dad bought? One that's meant to act as a teaching tool?
The game's maker, Ubisoft, told the Daily Mail that there's a junior option that can be enacted to ensure curse words don't make their way through to little kids. Carrington says she looked through the game book and didn't see any mention of a junior version, but then again - should she have to look? When you market a game at kids three and up, you sort of expect it to BE the junior version, don't you? Besides the fact that this is Scrabble, the game that's got leagues of grannies meeting in their living rooms on Tuesday afternoons. Are you really surprised that most parents felt safe handing the game straight over to their kids withoutchecking to ensure it won't teach their kids that "toke" means to "draw on a cannabis cigarette?"
Image/Source: The Daily Mail
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