Friday, September 2, 2016

Two Articles About Crossword Puzzles In Mainstream Media

Two articles about crossword puzzles in the main stream media this week.  I have some thoughts on them.

The first is an article in FiveThirtyEight by Oliver Roeder about indie crossword puzzles.  It's mainly just an overview of the current state of indie puzzles, but because it's FiveThirtyEight it tries to use data to make a point about indie puzzles being preferred by solvers.  It has a table of the "Most highly rated crosswords" according to the blog Diary of a Crossword Fiend, which, if you're familiar with said blog, you probably recognize is quite silly.  It's an excellent blog (go Amy!), and I think it's very cool that it got a shout-out, but there is no way that its ratings should be used in any serious analysis about the popularity of crosswords.

Looking at the results from a random day, all of 32 people rated the New York Times puzzle, and that was at least 11 more any other any other puzzle.  Many puzzles routinely get rated by a number of solvers in the single digits or low double digits.  So you are not just talking about a relatively small subset of crossword puzzle solvers -- those who visit the website -- but an even smaller subset among this small subset who actually rate the puzzles.  Plus, the most highly rated crossword on the list is Matt Gaffney's weekly meta puzzle.  It should at least be mentioned that the table includes several different types of puzzles, published at different frequencies, so it's not a straightforward, apples-to-apples comparison.  The author does give a parenthetical caveat, stating that the data "come from a highly selected sample," but an acknowledgement of bad data doesn't magically make it good data from which meaningful inferences can be drawn.

With that said, I'm not trying to be a hater, I enjoyed reading the article and found it both interesting and informative.  My own feeling is that I love indie puzzles, but this love manifests itself in theory much more than it does in practice.  As a solver, I rarely do indie puzzles.  I'm not a fanatical solver, and I only have the time and desire to do one crossword puzzle a day, so I do the New York Times every morning, and then that's about it.  (I also do the Saturday, themeless LA Times puzzle.)  I readily concede that many of the indie puzzles are "better" on average than that of the New York Times, but I like the ritual of solving the NYT puzzle, and I like the communal experience of solving the same puzzle, on the same day as many other people.  The New York Times is still the best for this.

As a constructor, I would love to make indie puzzles and put them up on my own little website for my own little following, but what I've found is that I don't have what it takes to make this happen.  Whether it's poor marketing or lousy networking or lack of patience, there is something in my personality that prevents me from being an effective indie constructor.  I actually tried it for a while.  I had a Seahawks blog, on which I also posted puzzles, but I didn't know how to get eyeballs on it, and I had little interest in figuring it out, so the whole endeavor went kaput.  I found I like it much better when I can make a puzzle and sell it to somebody else who already has the infrastructure in place to disperse it to the masses.  I'm a crossword puzzle mercenary.

Although, I mostly just submit to the New York Times now.  My feeling is I want the most people to do my puzzle as possible.  I'm egotistical that way.  Also, I've been having a much higher success rate of late with submissions to The Gray Lady than I did in the past, so I figure I might as well ride this quasi-hot streak as long as I can.

Anyway, the other article, also by Oliver Roeder, this one in Slate, was about Thursday's New York Times puzzle by noted indie constructor Ben Tausig.  It was a "Schrödinger puzzle," in which four squares could take either the letter M or F and still be correct, and then the big reveal running across the center of the puzzle was GENDER FLUID.  So the M/F squares are supposed to represent the gender fluidity -- the movement between male and female -- some people experience.  It was a nice puzzle.  I enjoyed it.  I also thought it was way overrated.

The Slate article called the puzzle "One of the Most Important Crosswords in New York Times History" in the title, and even if we dismiss this as click bait-y sensationalism, the article itself was also quite hyperbolic.

For one thing, the article touts the newness of the puzzle.  But it wasn't really anything that new.  It's true that the particular phrase GENDER FLUID had never been used in a puzzle before, but cool words and phrases make their puzzle debuts all the time -- and this includes plenty of words and phrases in the LGBTQ argot.  The New York Times crossword puzzle and its editor, Will Shortz, get a lot of grief from various critics (chief among them Rex Parker) for being tone-deaf to certain terms or for overly representing an old, white, male point of view -- and I often agree with such criticism -- but it is not fair to say that Will is unwilling to extend the boundaries of mainstream crossword puzzles and include new vocabulary from different walks of society and culture.  In my experience, he's actually quite open to this.

The two things about it, however, are (1) the puzzles are very much tailored to Will's taste, and he's an older white guy, so everything gets passed through the old white guy filter, which doesn't exactly facilitate diversity (if he had a co-editor who was, say, a woman of color, the "tone-deafness" would probably ebb drastically), and (2) the NYT puzzle moves extremely slowly.  It's usually a few years behind the times.  So when a new term is coined or the connotation of a word changes, it will typically be a long time before this is reflected in a puzzle.  For example, it wasn't until this year that the term CIS was clued as "Modern prefix with gender" instead of the stodgy "U.S.S.R.'s successor."

Nevertheless, there are loads of LGBTQ terms that have appeared in the NYT puzzle before.  A few examples are GAY FRIENDLY, GAY PRIDE, GAYBORHOOD, LGBT, BICURIOUS, QUEER EYE, and TRANS.  Even TRANSGENDERED has been in an NYT puzzle before.  Although I'm not sure that one helps my case being that the clue was "Like some cross-dressers."  Yikes!  The conflation of cross-dressing with transgenderism -- that is... bad.  But, you see my point: GENDER FLUID is a terrific entry for an NYT puzzle, but it's not one that is particularly groundbreaking.

The other thing about this puzzle is that on a technical level it's merely adequate.  Ideally, with Schrödinger puzzles, the clue should be able to "stand alone" with either of the possible answers.  For instance, "Old-seeming" works brilliantly for [F/M]USTY because that is a realistic clue for FUSTY or for MUSTY.  Also, "Word that can precede sex" is good for SA[F/M]E.  But something like "Tough stuff to walk through" for [F/M]IRE is iffy, because although it works for MIRE that would never be a clue for FIRE (is fire "stuff?") .  And "Reveal a secret, say" for [F/M]ESSUP is really contrived, because that clue would never be used for either of those answers by itself.  I found most of the Schrödinger clues in this puzzle to be much more on the "contrived" side than the "brilliant" side.  Of course, making a Schrödinger puzzle is really hard, so I really appreciate the constructor's effort.  He did a decent job, but he didn't totally nail it.

So what we have is a puzzle with a very cool, very creative theme, competent constructed despite an extremely high degree of difficult.  This puzzle is something  I would be very proud of if I constructed it.  It's a good puzzle.  But that's all.

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