Diversity is what will kill crosswords, and I don't mean diversity in the skin color or gender of the setters, but the fragmentation of culture where nobody watches the same TV channels or reads the same newspapers any more. We increasingly hive off into our own bubbles of preferred content, tied only by whatever cultural commonality we acquired in grade school.
There's just too much art, too many books, too many TV shows, and too much access to it all, to go back to the mostly-shared corpus of mostly-mutually-understandable cultural references we had in the 20th century. You would think that people would at least have read the really famous books, or seen the super popular TV shows, but I am regularly surprised to meet people who haven't.
Fair clues are foundational to crosswords, and foundational to fairness is understanding what the solver can be expected to know.
A Guardian crossword last week referenced The Beatles, Anthony Eden, and the Russian revolution. Fair game? All part of a standard British upbringing, surely? Perhaps for now, but for how long?
I haven't solved it recently but up until a few years ago the NYT basically had its own culture in the types of questions and answers it used, and the more you solved that specific crossword, the better you got.
I do NYT despite being British and I had to learn more than I ever wanted about the US and baseball, but it was a subconscious process. It is frustrating when they mention some obscure 70s TV show but I can usually get it from the crossings.
I feel this way about Wheel of Fortune. As a kid, I remember it being more...neutral. Maybe celebrities were just bigger then.
I have trouble when I catch it today because it often has a lot of modern pop culture references that are apparently not to my taste. People or songs I've not only not heard, but not heard of.
Then again, maybe I'm just getting old and yelling at the clouds.
The US host of 'The Chase' is terrible, and they fired the Beast for no real reason(I suspect...diversity), so I quit watching. You guys are lucky to have him.
>foundational to fairness is understanding what the solver can be expected to know.
No kidding. I've been seeing puzzles lately where so many answers are so completely obscure that finding half of their letters isn't enough. Unsolveable. Which leads me to wonder (who could know all this stuff?) if the answers aren't being filled in by machine.
Turns out my husband. He’s incredible at them. I also know another friend of a different culture, gender, and age that is also great at them. Some people are geared for it.
I was in high school 15 years ago when I first was interested in crosswords. I remember reading the news paper (or, at least, attempting to). I thought crosswords would at least be an accessible entry point.
There were questions from shows that ended in the 80's. Random political questions about nonsense. None of the questions seemed fair or reasonable. It's like going to a meetup but everyone except you have been best friends for 40 years and just keeps talking over you.
I immediately gave up and never even attempted to try again. I absolutely know I made the right call.
I could never understand the Guardian ones because they're too fucking British. I follow UK news and TV, but I can read the clues and see the answers and still have no idea.
The Guardian has about 4 different crosswords of various types. Your final sentence makes me think you might be talking about the cryptic ones which have their own hidden rules for how a clue works that no one explains for some reason.
Seems purposefully obscure to me, though I enjoy them and make a point of explaining there's rules to anyone who shows some interest.
Googling now, it seems the guardian has a blog for beginners that covers this:
I understand how cryptics work. I do cryptics from other newspapers.
I have seen the Guardians solutions and even their explanations, but they depend on things I don't understand, dated references, how tiny parts of the UK talk or worse, sports or celebrity crap I don't want to know.
despite there being much more fragmentation for what a pop culture reference is, than the 1900s, people still act surprised when you aren’t aware of a cultural reference from their own little microcosm
like the default isn't to just briefly explain it, the default is to genuinely confused for the next 5 minutes and derail the whole conversation
There's just too much art, too many books, too many TV shows, and too much access to it all, to go back to the mostly-shared corpus of mostly-mutually-understandable cultural references we had in the 20th century. You would think that people would at least have read the really famous books, or seen the super popular TV shows, but I am regularly surprised to meet people who haven't.
Fair clues are foundational to crosswords, and foundational to fairness is understanding what the solver can be expected to know.
A Guardian crossword last week referenced The Beatles, Anthony Eden, and the Russian revolution. Fair game? All part of a standard British upbringing, surely? Perhaps for now, but for how long?