Blabrecs: An AI-Based Game of Nonsense Word Creation

Blabrecs is a hybrid digital/physical board game and a rules modification to the popular wordgame Scrabble. In Blabrecs, as in Scrabble, players take turns drawing letter tiles from a bag and placing these tiles on a grid to form words, which are then scored based on letter frequencies and tile score multipliers to award players with points. Unlike Scrabble, however, Blabrecs does not use an English dictionary to determine what letter sequences constitute valid words. Instead, it uses a classifier trained on the dictionary to accept or reject letter sequences. Actual dictionary words are disallowed; only nonsense sequences that the classifier misclassifies as words are allowed to be played.

Physically, Blabrecs consists of a standard Scrabble set plus a computer running the Blabrecs web interface, which consists of a clientside-only web app written in HTML, CSS, and ClojureScript. The AI component of Scrabble consists of two classifiers: a Markov chain-based classifier and a more sophisticated classifier based on a separable convolutional neural network, both of which run directly in the web browser. Players can freely switch between these two classifiers as they play.

One of our primary goals in creating Blabrecs was to use AI to promote greater diversity in language use. Scrabble as a game is notorious for its imposition of an external authority (the dictionary) between players and their own language, and in this way it bears some resemblance to AI-based tools that try to standardize the use of language – sometimes via basic normalization of spelling and grammar, and sometimes even by fully rewriting the user's words into a different and more "correct" writing style, as in some recent LLM-based approaches to helping people write. Blabrecs was originally conceived in part as a protest against this standardization of language in all of its many forms.

By imposing deliberately absurdist constraints on language usage, Blabrecs forces players to create entirely new words. The web interface also provides space for players to write in their own definitions for these words, giving players even further support for generating a diverse vocabulary of new words. Based on our observations of past playtests of Blabrecs, the kinds of words that players invent are often influenced by their own diverse experiences and backgrounds, and no two player groups are likely to end up repeating the same word – a far cry from the standardization of language seen in high-level Scrabble play, where certain key words are memorized and employed in almost every game.

More generally, we hope that the way AI is used in Blabrecs (to push players away from the "typical", rather than pushing them towards it) provides a vision for how AI might be used similarly in other creative contexts. In a time of increasing AI-driven standardization of creative form, we feel that the use of AI to promote creative diversity is an important and underinvestigated direction for research in AI-based creativity support tools.

Blabrecs can be played online here: https://mkremins.github.io/blabrecs