When I say play, what comes to mind? Actors on a stage, perhaps, or the swish of a cricket bat? Puzzles in a magazine, maybe, or mahjong tiles in a box? Play could be the button on your remote—the arrow that starts the show—or playing in the musical sense. Or play can be what kids do, dragging out the Lego, the textas, the dress-up box. Thinking in binary mode, play could be seen as work’s opposite, something you squeeze into a weekend, the R&R that lightens the 9-to-5 load. Playing with the notion of play, this chapter shall explore mischief of the cognitive kind, proposing that play is more a state of mind. Even the game we’re playing now, bending play in multiple directions, is the rubbery thinking to counter a more concrete outlook—a cerebral version of elastics to see how far any notion can stretch.
The linguistic origin of the word is uncertain: there’s the Dutch ‘pleien’, meaning ‘to rejoice, or dance’ or ‘plegan’ in Old English, meaning ‘to move rapidly, to busy oneself ’. Whatever its roots, play is a catch-all term—take any tangent, you can’t go wrong. Shakespeare used the word 422 times across his 37 plays, from roleplay (‘Let me play the fool’) to gameplay (‘If thou dost play with him at any game’), with a dozen nuances in between.
Yet play is viewed indulgently by many adults—something frivolous, the antonym of earning your keep. ‘Child’s play’ is facile by virtue of idiom. Exasperated parents tell their noisy darlings to go away and play—play whatever, it doesn’t matter. It’s make-believe, inconsequential.
But we must guard against that mindset. The more we limit our notions of play, the poorer we become. According to Arnold Toynbee, the English historian, ‘The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.’
Shrewd advice, should you ask Pat Kane, a futurist from Glasgow, and author of The Play Ethic. To Kane, play is all about adaptability and potential. A play theorist and consultant, Kane defines play as ‘taking reality lightly’—the antidote to routine and competition. ‘Ever since the Reformation,’ says Kane, ‘puritans have been telling us that play is at best trivial, at worst demonic and the very least not work.’
According to Kane, the play mode is ‘boundary-challenging, reality-defying, insanely optimistic and relentlessly experimental,’ because when children lack the rules they’ll invent them. Play is less a game than being game, daring to surrender to the imagination. A young kid will talk off-script or fall into silence, engaging their mind in the all-encompassing now. Subsumed in play, a child adapts and imagines, tests or obeys their whims, sees where new pathways lead. All the while, as play unfurls, the player will believe in what they are doing, even if it’s make-believe.
In maturing, for want of a better word, we lose touch with that mind-frame. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche underscored the challenge: ‘The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of the child at play.’ As puzzle-maker and writer, that quote is my cornerstone. Rather than play, the quote’s crux is seriousness, purely because it doesn’t seem to belong. Surely play embodies fun, right? The pastime is an amusement after all—so why so serious?
The answer becomes clear whenever an adult joins a child at play. Believe me, if you’ve ever tried, you’re likely to be assigned one of two roles: the monster—the play’s enemy and ogrish threat from beyond—or the underling, play’s apprentice. The reason why is trust, or lack of it. Adults can’t be peers. Unless we surrender our status, we can’t be seen as truly belonging to play, since we don’t treat play seriously enough. Play should find us at our most plastic, and not in that hard-baked Lego kind of way. Mind you, away from the kits and manuals, Lego involves the shedding of rigidity, where play can lead to infinite outcomes, a slew of inventions and creations.
So where does play stand in relation to puzzles? By rights a puzzle seems more controlled than your typical spell of Lego. Clues demand a single answer, in meaning and length, with very little wiggle room. Does that mean puzzle play is more of this adult limitation? To a large extent, the answer’s yes. One clue awaits one answer, after all: the very definition of prescription. Yet cryptic play elicits far more than a single outcome as this chapter will reveal, the playful mindset a vital element in helping a solver reach that elusive eureka.
To see this truth played out, let’s consider play in the sense of ‘give’, like the so-called give of a slack rope, a margin of leeway, a looseness of thinking that characterises play. When solving puzzles, the brain can’t afford to be reductive in its thinking. Focus and logic will often yield rewards, but so does wiggle room, bringing an element of give to your thoughts. Canny solvers can play loose with a clue’s potential meaning. Success will often rest in the art of imagining other answers, lying in other directions, rather than obsessing over one interpretation, with one result. Indeed, there’s a danger in anticipating the look and shape of the answer before you get there, as if your next matchstick puzzle has a solitary way to be viewed, and thus one solution to be fetched.
Instead of life, the novelist Henry Miller might well have been describing puzzles when he said, ‘One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.’
The maxim underpins the puzzler’s mindset, the give you need to find the way home, toying with the puzzle.
The same words echo the pleasure principle that many solvers know, the reason why puzzles are classified as play in the first place. Don’t we all crave new ways to see things? Neuroscientist David Eagleman talks about the human trait of repetition suppression, that hunger we feel to experience the new, the joy we derive in the novel. That joy, in a sense, is also bundled into play, as our next section illustrates.
Loving solving
Time to visit the University of Buckingham, where two psychologists, doctors Kathryn Friedlander and Philip Fine, put 805 crossword solvers through their paces in 2015. The world-first experiment sought to understand what drives and distinguishes the sharper solvers of cryptic crosswords—their overall capacity to analyse and outwit the setter’s wiles. The study was also geared to ascertain their backgrounds, motivations, levels of education and careers. While most of the group hailed from Great Britain, there was a reasonable smatter from the United States, Australia, New Zealand and India, among five other countries.
Solving prowess was also considered, the volunteers divided into three categories of competency:
Ordinary—solvers who (by self-report) normally take longer than 30 minutes to solve quality broadsheet cryptics, such as The Times or Guardian, mastheads with a reputation for more guileful clues—as soon to be seen in the many sample clues of Part Two. The same solvers don’t usually tackle advanced cryptics, where a complex theme may govern the grid, or influence the answers in some way. And if they do, their success is limited.
Experts—those who can routinely solve one quality broadsheet cryptic in 30 minutes or less, who may compile crosswords professionally, or who tackle those more advanced, thematic cryptics with regular success.
Super—people who edit or compose cryptics professionally, on at least an occasional basis, for broadsheet or specialist publications; or those who regularly speed-solve a cryptic in under 15 minutes; or those who’d cracked tough puzzles consistently, such as the notorious Listener puzzles, with their barred diagrams, arcane vocabulary and rule-pushing motifs.
Never had such a herd of guinea pigs been mustered. The study lent science a rare chance to meet the puzzle page’s consumer, so to speak, and several intriguing patterns emerged. As Dr Friedlander revealed, ‘We found solvers tended to be qualified in scientific fields such as maths, computing, chemistry and medicine. What’s more, this trend increased significantly with expertise.’
Sure enough, among the super solvers, roughly a third worked in IT, compared to just a fifth within the ordinary group. Word power, in other words, was just one aspect of the study. If the data was any yardstick, the best brains also relied on logic and an appetite for code-cracking.
This inference was supported in the study’s own RIASEC survey, a model enabling the researchers to profile each solver according to their cognitive makeup. Also dubbed the Holland Codes, after US psychologist John Holland, RIASEC is a survey-derived glimpse into how different brains operate. The acronym stands for:
Realistic—the doers, the pragmatists, the DIY-ers
Investigative—the thinkers, from scientists to software developers
Artistic—the creators, the innovators, the designers
Social—the helpers, the teachers, the caring professions
Enterprising—the persuaders, the broadcasters, the sellers
Conventional—the organisers, the managers, the archivists
Looking at the list above, can you guess which two brain-modes were more prevalent across the Buckingham study, the two traits most shared by the solving elite?
Turns out the crossword gang displayed a strong Investigative mindset (over 40 per cent bias versus the typical 10 per cent among American solvers, according to an equivalent US study), as well as rating A for Artistic. In this category, the cryptic solvers reached the teens in most cases compared to 2 per cent in the general US pool.
The appetite to solve was another revelation. When it comes to tackling cryptic crosswords, Friedlander suggested, ‘The ability to think flexibly seems more important than hours of practice.’ Indeed, practice fell second to the desire to engage, going by the survey responses. ‘Many people … might be surprised at how little deliberate practice is done when it comes to crosswords. Solvers really don’t hone individual components of cryptic crosswords (such as anagrams) in the same way as chess players learn opening gambits, Scrabble players learn alphagrams, and violin players practice scales.’
Alphagrams, for non-Scrabble zealots, are seven-tile clusters that the best players memorise (see the box below). CELRSTU, for example, is the alphagram of CLUSTER, just as AELOSTZ is the alphagram of ZEALOTS. Embed these sequences into your brain, where each cluster’s aligned in alphabetical order, and the neurons might salvage that crucial bingo, a seven-tile play, at the next tournament. The logic behind the ploy is to allow any letter-string to resonate as soon as the pro-Scrabbler arranges their tiles from A to Z.
ALPHAGRAMS
Here are twelve possible Scrabble racks, each one holding at least two bingos (words using all seven tiles). As an added vocabulary test, one bingo is common, the other less familiar. AADEIRT, for example, yields RADIATE but also TIARAED and AIRDATE.
1. AAINRST
2. ADEGNRT
3. ADEIILS
4. ADEIOTS
5. AEEFIRS
6. AEEIMRT
7. AEELNST
8. AEENRTV
9. AEGNORS
10. AEHILNR
11. AEIMNOR
12. AEIMNRT
ANSWERS:
1. ARTISAN, TSARINA, 2. GRANTED, DRAGNET, 3. DAILIES, LIAISED, 4. TOADIES, IODATES, 5. FREESIA, FAERIES, 6. MEATIER, EMIRATE, 7. LEANEST, LATEENS (sails), 8. VETERAN, NERVATE, 9. ORANGES, ONAGERS (wild asses), 10. INHALER, HERNIAL, 11. ROMAINE, MORAINE (glacial debris), 12. MINARET, RAIMENT (apparel)
Crossword solvers are made of different stuff. Feedback from Buckingham reveals the elite rely more on the urge to solve, to bug the brain, rather than any notion of rehearsal or self-betterment. The name of the game is play, in other words. With few trophies or no salary to claim, cracking a puzzle serves as its own reward. ‘The solvers have a drive to think,’ Dr Friedlander observed. ‘An itchy brain they need to scratch whether in their hobbies or in their challenging careers.’
Crosswords embody a duel with the setter, an agile sport for two minds where the playspace is the alphabet. Another analogy that solvers invoke is a treasure hunt, the seeker’s brain roaming the grid in hope of the PDM (the penny-drop moment, to quote the study)—that wonderful flare in the frontal lobe. What few rules there are serve as a compact between code-maker and code-breaker, a protocol to encourage wide-open thinking, where any word could murmur an allusion, if your mind is alert enough to hear it. Come the endgame, the final clue unravelled, and the last answer lodged in place, the solver’s urge to play (and replay) is only whetted.
