Look away now, those who are made easily envious of animated favicons: my new column has launched on Boing Boing’s new game site, Offworld. It’s called One More Go, and it’s about the games I can’t stop going back to, and why I can’t stop going back to them. To my enormous surprise, this one turned out to be about New York Times Crosswords, although it really shouldn’t have been a surprise, because it’s been a constant companion pretty much every since it came out.

More surprisingly, I didn’t write any of the things I mean to write about it. I got, it’s fair to say, a bit distracted. What I was really planning to bang on about was some very different stuff, namely:

Crosswords are the perfect expression of how games are about the relationship between game-maker and game-player! We don’t talk about this nearly enough in mainstream videogames, but one of the reasons I’ve always loved them is the feeling that I’m playing an experience which has been crafted for me by someone I’ve never met. It’s like the best Valentine’s Day present ever: something that someone has spent years of their life on, designed to do nothing more than make you happy. And the odd bodged clue in NYTC highlights that very effectively – it makes you acutely conscious of the human being at the other end of this experience. It’s why I’ve always been more interested in single-player games than multi-player games; I’ve always been more interested in beating the master of the game than another of its participants. And this seems to be a culture crosswords share. People who regularly play cryptic crosswords have a strong sense of connection with the people who set them – people who they’ve never met, but who have, over decades in some cases, entertained, challenged and educated them. If you think I’m over-stating the case, then keep your eyes peeled for the return of BBC4′s How To Solve A Cryptic Crossword, which has infuriatingly just dropped off iPlayer, but which does a lovely job of summing up how intense the relationship can be between players and makers. Or doers and setters, or whatever the right crossword terminology would be.

Crosswords were initially vilified in almost exactly the same way games are! Namely, for being a waste of time and a passing fad. Wikipedia has most of the best quotes, so I won’t regurgitate them all here, but purely in the services of irony, here’s The New York Times itself railing against them in 1924 (they’re younger than you think, crosswords). Sound familiar?:

 ”[the] sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex. This is not a game at all, and it hardly can be called a sport… [solvers] get nothing out of it except a primitive form of mental exercise, and success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development.”

Crosswords embed really complex cultural variations within one very simple ruleset! One of the reasons I’ve stuck with NYTC for so long is that, as a UK crossworder, it’s so alien to me. The simple differential between UK and US crossword grids – US ones have fewer black square, so almost every letter of every word has to be in another word – means that US crosswords have to use much more unconventional words and slang phrases. UK crosswords are extremely orthodox by comparison. But then UK cryptic crosswords seem to be far more complex and traditional than their popular US counterparts (although I think some of the more esoteric US cryptics give them more than a run for their money). So, even before you get to the actual cultural context of the clues (and, let me tell you, it took me far longer than I’d like to admit to realise that a ‘Thanksgiving sidedish – 3 letters’ might be ‘yam’), there’s cultural data embedded in the ruleset. I love that you can tell a UK crossword from a US one just by looking at it. I wish we could still do that with videogames.

Final note: I’m not kidding about being stuck on that clue. Any takers?

 46 DOWN (6 letters): In cubbyholes (S blank R blank)