Graham has a short post up mentioning Heidegger’s distaste for the crossword puzzle. Given that we have a whole chapter about crosswords and related puzzles in Newsgames, I’m particularly keen to read this if anyone digs it up.
Heidegger’s reaction was actually quite common. Some may not realize that the crossword puzzle incited a moral panic when it rose to popularity in the 1920s, one much like later responses to comic books and videogames.
Here’s Gratton’s take on the matter:
Let me guess: the mechanization of the logos such that the true saying of the legein could not come into the clearing? Or was it just that they tended not to focus on middle German?
Funny though it may be, I suspect Peter’s guess at Heidegger’s objections may not be too far from the truth (intersecting reserve, perhaps). One of the weird things about the crossword is that it is not really about language, even though it appears to be. Rather it’s about comfort. Here’s a relevant excerpt from Newsgames:
From the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, puzzles had primarily provided comfort and distraction. Despite early word puzzlers who advocated for their educational benefits, it was the New York Times that solidified the intellectual merits of the puzzle as its primary purpose, unseating comfort as a primary reason for puzzling. But even in the haughty intellectual environment of the Times, [crossword editor Margaret] Farrar had the suspicion that the crossword might serve a purpose beyond, or even before enlightenment. Such is the reason she had dampened the paper’s charge in the 1940s to elevate the puzzle to the rest of the publication’s high journalistic standards, opting instead for softer though still intellectual fare.
A pattern emerges from Farrar’s approach. Even if puzzles don’t always provide serenity, they do offer logical consistency. The world is a messy place where solutions often elude one’s grasp, but a crossword is always neat and tidy. Michelle Arnot even closes her history of the crossword with such a sentiment: “By presenting a solvable problem, the puzzle offers comfort to a chaotic world.” A sense of psychic comfort rises above matters of politics and current events in the minds of crossword constructors and players.
Oh, did I mention you can still preorder the book for $16 or so? Should be out by end of summer.
Comments
joyeuse13
Once I started working with language corpora, I realized that crossword puzzles are all about collocates. Which explains why I can’t do them in French–despite being fluent, I don’t know the “standard” collocations that a native French speaker would automatically have on tap.
Ian Bogost
Interesting point! One of the crossword-derived puzzle games we discuss in the book is the Crickler, which tries to avoid the collocation problem by offering more context. It does this by exploding the puzzle from the overlapping grid, instead using computationally-discovered letter overlaps across multiple rows.
Ernest Adams
You haven’t addressed the bizarre and twisted world of the British cryptic crossword. In it the clues are not merely definitions, but quasi-witty plays on the word itself. There’s nothing comforting about them. It’s a vicious competition between the solver and the setter, with the solver generally admiring and hating the setter for being a brilliantly devious bastard. Kind of the like how Patton felt about Rommel.
Just as an example, Inspector Morse’s first name can be rendered as a cryptic crossword clue: “Around Eve”. The word “around” tells you that the clue is an anagram or involves rearranging letters somehow. But an American would interpret possible answers to such a clue as “snake,” “Adam,” “apple,” “Eden,” etc.
Ian Bogost
Right, one of the things we discuss in the book is how the crossword has served as a base for other games and puzzles that have derived their play and experiences from it. In many cases, the sensations derived from these new puzzles are quite different from the original.
Becky
Interesting article!
I am an avid player of Crickler Crossword and the part of your article that really struck me was “The world is a messy place where solutions often elude one’s grasp, but a crossword is always neat and tidy.” I couldn’t agree more. That is why I consistently play Crickler. I also love algebra for this same reason. There is always a neat and tidy way to find the answer and there is only one answer.
Anyway, I saw in one of your comments that you talk about Crickler in one of your chapters and between the line I quoted above and the fact that you discuss Crickler, I am going to read the book! Sounds like an intriguing read!