Abstract
Words with Friends, the cross-platform Scrabble-like game created in 2008 by Zynga, allows players to joust verbally with their friends using an application on Facebook, Kindle Fire, iPhone, and other digital devices. Players in turn form words from seven randomly selected letters and connect them, crossword-fashion, to previously formed words in the playing space. Inherently competitive, even combative, the game is also social and public.1 During play, the network makes known who is playing, whom they are playing against, who wins, and who has accomplished spectacular moves, such as using all tiles to earn the coveted 50-point bonus. In other words, the public dimension is not tangential but rather integral to the game’s appeal. Moreover, although players may choose their opponents, they may not control how information about individual games spreads: updates are passed from a player’s profile to the newsfeeds of that person’s friends, then to friends of friends, etcetera. The exponential spread of information means commercial success for social games. In 2010, Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch.com wrote:
The premise of Words is simple: you fire it up and are playing a Scrabble-like word game against one of your friends in seconds. There’s no single player mode [sic]—the entire experience is built around multiplayer. And that formula has proven to be golden: the app now has over 1.6 million daily active users, who average a full hour of playing every day.2
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Notes
One person notes on scrabblepages.com: “Of course, some people love the competition. Scrabble is a way to compete against one or more opponents in a battle of wits. Everybody wants to feel like he or she is clever sometimes, so the competitive nature of Scrabble still exists even when playing with friends and loved ones, even when everyone at the table is laughing and having a good time.” Scrabblepages, accessed January 30, 2014, http://scrabblepages.com.
Jason Kincaid, “A Look behind the Words with Friends iPhone Gaming Phenomenon,” Techcrunch, June 10, 2010, accessed January 30, 2014, http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/10/a-look-behind-the-words-with -friends-iphone-gaming-phenomenon.
In his article, “Jeu-parti,” Samuel N. Rosenberg notes, “The earliest are due to Thibaut de Champagne, whose renown no doubt contributed to the genre’s success among the poet-musicians of Arras, especially Jehan Bretel and Adam de la Halle.” Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, ed. William W. Kibler and Grover Zinn (New York: Garland, 1995), p. 495.
Michelle Stewart, “The Melodic Structure of Thirteenth-Century ‘Jeux-Partis,’” Acta Musicologica 51 (1979): 86-107
Brumana Pascale Biancamaria, “Le musiche dei Jeux-partis francese,” Annali delta Facolta di Lettere e Filosofia delta Università degli Studi di Perugia XIII (1975-1976), pp. 509-72.
It has long been debated whether or not these songs were improvised or co-composed between the two players. Michèle Gaily has most recently weighed in upon the question and presented some persuasive arguments in favor of improvisation in the section “Composer ou improviser?” in her Farter d’amour au puy d’Arras: Lyrique en jeu (Orleans: Paradigme, 2004), pp. 67-79.
Michèle Gaily, “Jeux-partis de Thibaut de Champagne: Poétique d’un genre mineur,” in Thibaut de Champagne: Prince et poète au XIIIe siècle, ed. Yvonne Bellenger and Danielle Quéruel (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), p. 96 [89-97].
On pp. 333-43 of the second volume of the Recueil général des jeux-partis français (Paris: Champion, 1926), Arthur Långfors provides a table of all identified poets and judges. This two-volume edition, with Alfred Jeanroy and Louis Brandin, continues to be cited for many jeux-partis, though scholars working on a particular poet may cite standard editions of that composer’s work.
For a discussion of Aristotelian and scholastic precedents, a passing discussion of the jeu-parti, and a focus on later debate literary forms, see Emma Cayley, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), especially chapter 1, pp. 12-51.
For a short biography of Thibaut, see the introduction to Axel Wallensköld, Les chansons de Thibaut de Champagne, roi de Navarre (Paris: SATF [Société des Anciens Textes Français], 1925), pp. xi-xxvii.
John Haines, Eight Centuries of the Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.18.
Haines discusses ms. M elsewhere in “The Transformations of the Manuscrit du Roi,” Musica Disciplina 52 (2002): 5-43
Sylvia Huot offers some historical perspective: “It is, of course, impossible now to be sure of the truth of this statement [in the Grandes Chroniques]. Thibaut’s songs do, however, appear in almost exactly the same order in nearly every manuscript, suggesting common derivation from an early, authoritative compilation. We may recall in this context that Thibaut was the descendent of Guillaume IX, the first known troubadour. That Guillaume’s songs were the first to have been written down and associated with the name of a specific person is most likely due to his high social standing, which enabled him to provide for the written preservation of his songs. Thibaut can hardly have been unaware of the poetic fame of his illustrious ancestor; a similar pride in his own achievement may have led him to have a compilation made,” From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 65-66.
Emanuèle Baumgartner, “Présentation des chansons de Thibaut de Champagne dans les manuscrits de Paris,” in Thibaut de Champagne: Prince et poète au XIIIe siècle, ed. Yvonne Bellenger and Danielle Quéruel (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), pp. 35-44.
A more complete examination of this manuscript and its Artesian flavor is discussed in Daniel O’Sullivan, “Thibaut de Champagne and Lyric Auctoritas in Paris, BnF, French 12615,” in Textual Cultures 8.2 (2013): 31-49.
See her complete descriptions, including a mathematical demonstration that accounts for what has probably been lost through the lacunae of ms. A, in “Intavulare” Tables de Chansonniers romans II. Chansonniers français. 1. a (BAV, Reg lat 1490), b (BAV, Reg Lat 1522), A (Arras, Biblio. Mun. 657) (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana). Other important sources of information on ms. A include Alfred Jeanroy’s facsimile edition, and Robin Lockert’s “The Chansonnier d’Arras: A Critical Edition,” MA Thesis (McMaster University, 1993).
Theodore Karp, “Gilles le Vinier,” Grove Music Online, accessed December 18, 2013, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/book/omo_gmo.
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© 2015 Serina Patterson
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O’Sullivan, D.E. (2015). Words with Friends, Courtly Edition: The Jeux-Partis of Thibaut De Champagne. In: Patterson, S. (eds) Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497529_4
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