Interesting New York Magazine article on the modern evolution of cross-word puzzles — and the challenge they face, popularity-wise, from newcomer numeric Sudoku puzzles.
I’m not a heavy-duty cross-worder — maybe one or two a month, usually in a flight magazine or something — but I enjoy them. I’ve tried Sudoku, and it just doesn’t do it for me (though I used to be quite the number puzzle kind of guy). It is interesting, though, the shift in popularity. Is it a matter of novelty, a change in thinking patterns (numeric vs lexical), or what?
What precisely is the allure? Shortz argues that Sudoku has a secret psychological hook. While solving them, you tend to get bogged down midway—then suddenly break through, fill in the last bunch of empty boxes in a row, bang bang bang. “It gives you a satisfying feeling to be rushing at those squares,” Shortz says. “And immediately you want to do another one. That’s the key to why they are so addictive.”
Yet it is also, in a way, a total negation of crossword culture. Sudoku requires no knowledge of trivia or history, no literary bent. Sudoku doesn’t care what you know, smarty-pants; it just wants you to act like a logic cruncher, a Pentium chip. “It’s not what you know—it’s how you think. That’s what Sudoku tests,” says Gould. Its nonlinguistic nature is precisely why it has spanned the globe so quickly: A puzzle created in the U.S. can be sold to China or Germany with no translation necessary, and American immigrants who don’t speak good English can happily solve Sudokus.
Less charitably, one could regard Sudoku as the lowest common denominator— a puzzle for a nation whose citizens no longer presume to have any culture in common. “I don’t want to call it a dumbing down of society,” Abby Taylor, Dell’s editor-in-chief, says delicately, but she has noticed that nonlanguage puzzles like Sudoku—or nondemanding ones like word searches—have been steadily increasing in sales, while sales of difficult crosswords remain flat.
So as you’d imagine, many crossword fanatics regard Sudoku with the disdain a jazz purist might have for American Idol. “It interests me about one-tenth as much as the crossword,” Rosenthal says with a shrug. For crossword constructors, Sudoku represents a robotic outsourcing of the puzzle trade. Sudoku requires no individual artistry, no exquisite handcrafting; the puzzles are simply cranked out by computers, the Coca-Cola of conundrums.
It would be interesting to look ahead five or ten years and see what’s going on then.
(via GeekPress)
My roomie, who edits logic puzzles for the Penny Press, has VERY strong opinions about Sudoku and the puzzle-buying world. Considering it’s a matter of livlihood for some people, it is sad how these randomly-generated games are supplanting quizes that actually test knowledge and skill, rather than brain patterns.
I don’t like Sudoku. Essentially, each one is the same. They become quite tedious for me. I hadn’t realized that they were computer-generated, but it makes sense.
And, as i mentioned to kate, I swear by Penny Press! I never buy anything else. I’m partial to their Logic Problem mags (I bought a grab bag several years ago) and their Variety Puzzles (Anagram Magic Square! Escalators! Diagramless Crosswords! Wheeee!). Kate, can you get him to ship me a boatload of back issues? 😉