Daily Distraction: TrademarkVille


Trademarkville hijacked my morning. The plot is simple: Words are getting trademarked as soon as they are used. Therefore new words are constantly needed. Your job is to either come up with a new word to replace an old one or guess what a new word means. Once a new word has been made, that word becomes instantly trademarked and so it can no longer be used by other players. If you use ‘female wizard’ as the new word for ‘witch’, neither the word ‘female’ nor the word ‘wizard’ can be used anymore

Example: The word ‘fetus’ has been trademarked. I propose ‘betababy’ as a new word. And then @donofmath comes along and guesses that I’m trying to refer to an unborn child in it’s mother’s womb without getting in trouble with the Trademark Police. I couldn’t write ‘beta baby’ as ‘baby’ had already been used once and so had been trademarked.

The whole thing is obviously a pariody of the whole Candy Crush Saga absurdity where the publisher of CCS tried to get a monopoly on using the words making up the game’s title. Or something like that. The internet doesn’t tend to preserve the nuances of IP law debates very well.

What it is from a player point of view is a fun and silly challenge to be creative in your choice of words. Throw your vocabulary about in search of good, crossword-style synonyms (‘slapstick PA’ for jester? ‘nongreen cucumber’ for banana?) or just mash words together in outrageous punnery (‘man-inna-can’ for knight and ‘femagician’ for witch are pretty neat, no?)

You can get rewarded by other players for particularly good new words but mostly you’ll just be challenging yourself to come up with something at once precise and witty. Which can only be a good thing.

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