Scribblenauts Accidentally Offends With Racial Slur

By Akela Talamasca on September 17th, 2009

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For the great unwashed among you who haven’t heard of the Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts, it’s a puzzler that pits your imagination against a ton of situations that you can solve with your ability to write down a noun and have that object appear in the scene. So, for instance, you could be faced with the task of getting your hero up a steep cliff. You could write “balloon” and he’d be floated to the top, or you could write “jetpack” and he’d zoom right up there.

Well, apparently the game recognizes the word “sambo”, an Ecuadorian term for a local fig leaf gourd, which is used in the recipe for a dish called fanesca. This is all fine and dandy, except that the item that appears when writing “sambo” looks a lot like a watermelon. I don’t need to put it together for you smart folks, do I?

5th Cell, the developers of Scribblenauts, were quick to point out that they have many examples of black characters in the game, and one of their developers is himself black, so this is just one of those weird cultural hiccups that are bound to occur occasionally … especially when you’ve created a database of tens of thousands of words for use in your interpretive game.

To say that I’m dying to play this game would be a gross understatement; what wordsmith doesn’t dream of the power to manifest objects must by writing about them? And now I’m trying to keep my brain from entertaining notions of what happens when you write “harem”, “voluptuous”, and “happy ending”.