The Mini, she argues, devalues the Times’s brand, dubbing it “the People magazine crossword puzzle of the New York Times.” Mini, she writes, “is a four-letter word for ‘Are you kidding me?’” (There are other four-letter words unsaid.) “It doesn’t tickle your mind,” she continues, “so much as punch you in the brain with its blatancy. In a Slate article with the demure title “The New York Times ‘Mini Crossword’ Is an Utter Disgrace to the NYT Crossword Brand,” contributor Ruth Graham lambastes the Mini in maximal bombast like the Tamworth Herald writer who dreamed up the hyperbolically hysterical hyacinths in “AN ENSLAVED AMERICA,” Graham is at once serious in the substance of her gripe and giddy with the vitriol of her style. A difficult daily might take half an hour, minimum the toughest Mini might take two minutes, max.Ĭrossworders initially greeted the Mini with mixed reviews. The Mini is usually a five-by-five grid, in comparison to the daily fifteen-by-fifteen, and the clues are, on average, much more straightforward. The Times wanted to be able to offer something for free to hook solvers into paying for a crossword subscription, so Joel Fagliano created a miniature amuse-bouche. In 2014, the Times introduced a bite-sized version of a crossword, only on its digital app. By contrast, over a dozen full-time Times employees are dedicated to running the Games department smoothly: back-end programmers making sure that the puzzle works front-end programmers who translate games to all platforms API and iOS specialists who fix compatibility issues development managers a designated games marketing team designers who build new games and designers who foresee and precorrect problems, like making the Mini crossword more prominent on the site to addict new users. The print crossword, technologically speaking, has changed only in that Shortz emails completed files to Manhattan rather than using fax or snail mail. Although the flagship of Games is the crossword, the department’s programmers, marketers, designers, and editors have developed a flotilla of ancillary puzzles, some retooled old favorites, some new for the site: Letterbox, Set, KenKen, Sudoku, Spelling Bee, and more. The digital crossword soon launched an entire Games department at the Times. Crossword apps are legion-Redstone Games’s Crossword Puzzle, Penny Dell Crossword Daily, Crossword Quiz+, Clean Crosswords, Little Crosswords-and when you include word game apps in general, the list explodes. And the Times’s app is hardly the only game in town. At $39.99 a subscription, that’s over $20 million in crossword bucks per year. In 2019, the Times crossword app had over half a million subscribers, double what they’d had the previous year. Before then, the Times had outsourced the game to another company’s platform, but since the app was doing so well, corporate decided to expand the operation. The Times’s crossword app has been housed in-house since 2014. But now, the New York Times and the New York Times crossword became distinct entities. Until this point, a newspaper’s crossword solvers also had to be its readers, even if they did nothing with the rest of the paper except flip through it to get to the puzzle. You also didn’t automatically get a subscription to the Times if you bought a Times crossword subscription. If you subscribed to the Times digitally, you would no longer automatically get the crossword now, you had to pay a separate fee and download separate software to play the puzzle on your devices. But in 2012, for the first time in the then-seventy-year history of the Times’s crossword, the puzzle-at least, the digital version-got monetized. Originally, the online version, like its print counterpart, got bundled with the paper a subscription to the digital Times also gave you access to that day’s crossword puzzle online. You can begin the puzzle on your phone in the subway, plug away on your desktop at work, and finish it on your tablet at night. The digital Times puzzle was developed to be the equivalent of carrying around a folded-over Arts section in your pocket, something that follows you on all your screens. The New York Times launched its digital crossword in 1997, fifty-five years after the puzzle’s print debut in that paper. In the digital age, the puzzle has only continued to prove its cockroachlike ability to adapt while remaining exactly the same. Computers have hardly made the crossword obsolete. The version that’s thrived in the digital landscape is the original crossword. Photo: From THINKING INSIDE THE BOX by Adrienne Raphel, courtesy of Penguin Press.
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