Attention all Connections fiends, Wordle lovers and Spelling Bee solvers: Strands is a new game that the New York Times Games team is beta-testing. It will be free for everyone to play on the web beginning March 4.
This new puzzle is a word search with a unique twist. When solvers open the game, they will see a 6-by-8 grid of words. Solvers can track the number of words they have found at the bottom-right corner of the board as they play.
Tracy Bennett, the Wordle editor, who also edits Strands, said the game will appeal to people who enjoy anagrams or games like Boggle and Scrabble. Everdeen Mason, the editorial director of Games, said it can even serve as a steppingstone for players seeking to understand the tricks of the Crossword.
How to Play
Why a Word Search?
Zoe Bell, the executive producer of Games, said that word searches have a long history in newspapers. In 1968, Norman E. Gibat published word searches in the “Selenby Digest,” a flyer he distributed in Oklahoma supermarkets. Around the same time, Pedro Ocón de Oro, a Spanish puzzle maker, was creating word searches he called “sopas de letras,” or “soups of letters.” In the 1970s and 1980s, word searches started to appear more in newspapers and activity books.
Juliette Seive, a research director on the New York Times Games team, came up with the original pitch for Strands.
“I was talking to my partner about it, and he said, ‘I had this super fun word search game that I loved playing with my grandma, and I feel like there are no fun word searches now,’” she said.
Ms. Seive was inspired by the success of Wordle, a game Josh Wardle, a software engineer, created as a gift for his partner, a word game lover.
“I thought, ‘Great. I’ll pitch something that I think would make my partner happy,’” she said.
Ms. Seive’s research found that New York Times Games players also solve word searches, according to Heidi Erwin, a puzzle designer on the team. “But they aren’t super happy with the level of challenge,” Ms. Erwin said.
“What I saw in looking at the competition is that there aren’t as many word searches with a twist,” Ms. Seive said. “How do we make it feel fun for adults, beyond finding words?”
Strands is also a game that solvers can come back to after their first attempt. “It’s a slightly deeper, longer game than our other ones,” Ms. Bell said.
What Makes Strands a Times Game?
The team’s goal is to produce puzzles that are “thoughtfully made, thoughtfully played,” Jonathan Knight, the general manager and leader of the Games team, said.
What makes Strands a New York Times game is its human touch. The editors are known for crafting clever wordplay, testing solvers’ knowledge and coming up with lively themes. All of the puzzle editors and some other Games team members contribute their own word lists. Players may eventually recognize their individual personalities in the game, Ms. Erwin speculated with a smile.
Ms. Bennett loved word searches as a child, and later became an avid Boggle player, so she was excited to edit this new game. She said that her experience constructing and editing crosswords comes in handy with Strands.
“The spangram should sum things up in some way,” she said. “It’s almost like a revealer in a crossword, where it shows you what is connecting all of these words.”
Some themes are fill-in-the-blank phrases. They may also be steps in a process, items that all belong to the same category, synonyms or homophones. Just as she varies the difficulty of Wordle puzzles within a week, Ms. Bennett plans to throw Strands solvers curveballs every once in a while.
Since puzzle editors have to work within the rules of the game, all the words have to fit into the 6-by-8 grid without overlap. Another constraint is that the theme words cannot be proper names, Christina Iverson, a puzzle editor, explained. (The spangram, though, can be a proper name.)
Ms. Iverson enjoyed thinking of entries that had a pop-culture theme. For example, “room” and “twilight” are words, but they are also recognizable as book titles.
The Process
The team hosts an annual event called Game Jam, where staff members gather to explore ideas for new games. The pitching process is open to everyone, something that differentiates the New York Times Games team from other studios.
Ms. Seive brought the idea to a group of people at Game Jam, and Ms. Bennett offered to help shape it with cohesive theme words and an overarching challenge.
In their pitch, Ms. Seive and Ms. Bennett included a basic prototype — what they called a “clickable walk-through” of the game. A few weeks after Game Jam, a concept committee made up of team leaders evaluated the pitch and prototype and, with a vote, decided that Strands should move forward.
Ms. Bell is on the concept committee, and runs the greenlight process that determines if a game is introduced to the public. She sees a lot of potential in Strands. Like Connections, it asks solvers to find hidden links among words.
“It gets at that ‘aha’ moment that I think people look for in our games,” she said.
Jeff Petriello is the producer of the New Games squad, a small part of the team that he described as “an internal incubator for experimental ideas.” He said that the prototyping process “shaped the gameplay at its most fundamental” level.
When the squad tested the boards with solvers from outside The Times, for example, the puzzles were deemed too tough. Solvers needed a leg up, so the squad added Today’s Theme. They also came up with the hint system during the prototyping process, Mr. Petriello said.
Ms. Erwin mentioned that the team took some time to clarify the function of the spangram. They decided that the theme would be a hint about what to look for in the puzzle, and the spangram would be a special word that summarized the theme.
After Ms. Iverson and the other editors construct the word lists, Ms. Bennett edits them. Then Ms. Erwin draws a 6-by-8 grid of letters on a sticky note. She places the spangram first and fits theme words around it. Finally, she uses an algorithm to check for overlaps, guaranteeing that when players find a word, they find it in exactly one spot on the board.
Strands is meant to fill that word-search-size hole in solvers’ hearts.
“I hope that people like my partner and his grandma, who are nostalgic for word searches, can find a home in this game,” Ms. Seive said.
Word search-hungry solvers can find Strands here.
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiS2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMjQvMDMvMDQvY3Jvc3N3b3Jkcy9zdHJhbmRzLXdvcmQtc2VhcmNoLWdhbWUuaHRtbNIBAA?oc=5
2024-03-04 13:30:02Z
CBMiS2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMjQvMDMvMDQvY3Jvc3N3b3Jkcy9zdHJhbmRzLXdvcmQtc2VhcmNoLWdhbWUuaHRtbNIBAA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "How the New York Times Made Its Newest Word Search Game, Strands - The New York Times"
Post a Comment