Traditional crossword puzzles are incredibly successful but they have several serious drawbacks: (1) They are difficult to construct, (2) Most words are short and often silly--chosen only because they fit, (3) Matching clues to numbers is a distraction, and (4) A given puzzle is usually either too easy or too hard. Cricklers solve all of these problems while retaining the essence and feel of a traditional crossword puzzle.
As the Cricks' design values suggest, one of the benefits of the crickler is that it decouples clues from the arbitrariness of puzzle arrangement. This feature allows cricklers to be more easily and more meaningfully themed than other word puzzles. The Cricks also rightly underscore the fact that this improvement would be difficult without computational assistance.
The Cricks solve problem four in their above explanation through a procedural handicapping and hinting system. Anytime players are stumped, they may click on an owl at the top of the puzzle to receive a clue. This can only be done when the player is "truly stuck," meaning there's a per-minute cap on the number of clues the owl will distribute based on their skill level. The handicap features an incredibly fine granularity, running from 0 to 36 (lower scores leading to more difficult puzzles), and it is calculated every time a player finishes one puzzle to move on to another. Forsaking hints and finishing puzzles quickly will lead to a lower handicap, which affects the number of letter-links between solutions in each list and the difficulty of the questions in some modes.
There are a number of usability features built into Crickler, so even HCI experts can finally sit back and relax with a puzzle rather than vexing themselves over accessibility and hidden bias. These range from the ability to use a serif or sans-serif font to a "King's English" moude that adapts to the spelling tastes of the British. The puzzle's layout can also be changed from horizontal to vertical (solution on top of question), wide to narrow. Players can also set the viewing mode to only display one question at a time (significantly reducing the ability to quickly scan a number of other answers for interconnecting letter clues).
Among the crickler variants is a "newspuzzle" that draws its clues from the daily news. The newspuzzle requires some synthetic knowledge about the content of the news, rather than the simple guesswork of missing words in a headline. For example, the October 22, 2009 puzzle includes the following clue: "A court in Miami sentenced Colombian drug kingpin Diego Montoya to 45 years in prison following his guilty plea on trafficking, _______ and racketeering charges." The six-letter answer, "murder," isn't immediately obvious for players unfamiliar with the case.
Weirdly, crickler puzzles don't include links to relevant articles on the subject of their clues, even though the puzzles have been syndicated to a number of papers, including The Washington Post. Completing a puzzle requires players to seek out, read, and comprehend current coverage on a variety of topics, but they must find the sources on their own. While syndication subscribers like the Post might gnash their teeth at the missed opportunity, it's possible that the game benefits by requiring the media literacy skills to identify the topic, locate additional coverage, and evaluate that coverage for the response in question.
Another crickler mode is the "perpetual puzzle," which relies more heavily on the handicap level by simply generating news-agnostic vocabulary and history questions. Players can set a question number for their perpetual puzzles ranging from 10 to 50. Although this might seem the superior crickler on paper, it suffers from a lack of the culture questions that make crosswords great. The focus on current events makes up for this absence in the newspuzzle, but the perpetual puzzle is a hollow experience that might best be used for studying for the SAT verbal section--it's basically a vocabulary quiz presented in an interconnected list.
The final mode, "puzzle of the week," focuses on trivia about one particular subject, such as "The State of Arizona." This crickler reveals another strength of the form, allowing players to learn a lot about one thing by starting with a few common facts and using hints to learn more. You don't notice the lack of informational or contextual links here, because each serves as a self-contained lesson.
Crickler builds upon the crossword as an intellectual institution, refining its connection to knowledge and language by adjusting its form to exclude throw-away filler clues. Customization features make up for its lack of visual flair, and each modes serves to build a different form of literacy through the shared form of connecting items in a list through common letters. This family-designed digital newsgame suggests that a variety of new puzzle forms might still arise from the the humble crossword.
Prepared by Ian Bogost and Simon Ferrari.
The Cricks solve problem four in their above explanation through a procedural handicapping and hinting system. Anytime players are stumped, they may click on an owl at the top of the puzzle to receive a clue. This can only be done when the player is "truly stuck," meaning there's a per-minute cap on the number of clues the owl will distribute based on their skill level. The handicap features an incredibly fine granularity, running from 0 to 36 (lower scores leading to more difficult puzzles), and it is calculated every time a player finishes one puzzle to move on to another. Forsaking hints and finishing puzzles quickly will lead to a lower handicap, which affects the number of letter-links between solutions in each list and the difficulty of the questions in some modes.
There are a number of usability features built into Crickler, so even HCI experts can finally sit back and relax with a puzzle rather than vexing themselves over accessibility and hidden bias. These range from the ability to use a serif or sans-serif font to a "King's English" moude that adapts to the spelling tastes of the British. The puzzle's layout can also be changed from horizontal to vertical (solution on top of question), wide to narrow. Players can also set the viewing mode to only display one question at a time (significantly reducing the ability to quickly scan a number of other answers for interconnecting letter clues).
Among the crickler variants is a "newspuzzle" that draws its clues from the daily news. The newspuzzle requires some synthetic knowledge about the content of the news, rather than the simple guesswork of missing words in a headline. For example, the October 22, 2009 puzzle includes the following clue: "A court in Miami sentenced Colombian drug kingpin Diego Montoya to 45 years in prison following his guilty plea on trafficking, _______ and racketeering charges." The six-letter answer, "murder," isn't immediately obvious for players unfamiliar with the case.
Weirdly, crickler puzzles don't include links to relevant articles on the subject of their clues, even though the puzzles have been syndicated to a number of papers, including The Washington Post. Completing a puzzle requires players to seek out, read, and comprehend current coverage on a variety of topics, but they must find the sources on their own. While syndication subscribers like the Post might gnash their teeth at the missed opportunity, it's possible that the game benefits by requiring the media literacy skills to identify the topic, locate additional coverage, and evaluate that coverage for the response in question.
Another crickler mode is the "perpetual puzzle," which relies more heavily on the handicap level by simply generating news-agnostic vocabulary and history questions. Players can set a question number for their perpetual puzzles ranging from 10 to 50. Although this might seem the superior crickler on paper, it suffers from a lack of the culture questions that make crosswords great. The focus on current events makes up for this absence in the newspuzzle, but the perpetual puzzle is a hollow experience that might best be used for studying for the SAT verbal section--it's basically a vocabulary quiz presented in an interconnected list.
The final mode, "puzzle of the week," focuses on trivia about one particular subject, such as "The State of Arizona." This crickler reveals another strength of the form, allowing players to learn a lot about one thing by starting with a few common facts and using hints to learn more. You don't notice the lack of informational or contextual links here, because each serves as a self-contained lesson.
Crickler builds upon the crossword as an intellectual institution, refining its connection to knowledge and language by adjusting its form to exclude throw-away filler clues. Customization features make up for its lack of visual flair, and each modes serves to build a different form of literacy through the shared form of connecting items in a list through common letters. This family-designed digital newsgame suggests that a variety of new puzzle forms might still arise from the the humble crossword.
Prepared by Ian Bogost and Simon Ferrari.
