The new Kindle game Every Word really means every word, even slangish, potentially offensive terms.
At his blog laughing-stalk, Erik Deckers wrote that last night he was trying to finish an Every Word game and got stuck on one final, missing term.
I was missing one 6-letter word. Not wanting to leave an incomplete board before I moved to the next level, I logged on to an online Scrabble anagram generator to see if I could find it.
The generator gave me three choices: agings, gaping, paging. The game accepted gaping and paging, but had a word in between that I just wasn’t getting.
Frustrated, he gave up and let the game show him the missing word. Shield your eyes, o reader, if you find hip-hop racial slang offensive in pictographic form when included as part of a blog post. (Just to be on the safe side, I’ll put it after the jump.)
CrunchGear picked up Deckers’ post earlier today, and shortly thereafter Amazon contacted them to say it was pulling the game off the Kindle Store until it could replace the dictionary with a bowdlerized version.
Meh. I’m not sure I can bring myself to be offended by a term that’s not even used by white racists in a derogatory manner (or at all, I imagine), but rather by members within a group to refer to one another; I’m not even sure you could claim that it’s just used to refer to members of one race by young people anymore. However, I always thought it was spelled with a “z.”
But whatever, you know how people can be, and Amazon is a big target right now for potential outrage–especially the kind that the media can blow up into a short cycle. If you didn’t download a copy before it was yanked, you’ll have to wait until the new version is posted. And yes, Amazon told CrunchGear that it will update existing copies of the game as well.
“Amazon Kindle Game “Every Word” Uses N-Word” [laughing-stalk via CrunchGear]