The World
Puzzle Championship is an international event that began in 1992 and has taken
place in different cities all over the world for the past 21 years. During the most recent competition, held in
Kraljevica, Croatia, TIME Magazine sent Lev Grossman to report on the state of
the United States’ top puzzle team. In
his article, Grossman not only discusses the lives of some of the world’s top
puzzlers, but he also attempts to explain our society’s fascination with
puzzles in general.
Grossman
attributes much of our intrest in puzzles to the fact that they provide
us with complete control and concrete answers.
For example, he compared one of the puzzles in the competition with the
physical setting of the championship. In
this particular puzzle, competitors had to fit fake boats into a fake harbor
of Kralijevica, while in reality, the actual harbor had to be shut down due to
the global recession. Grossman writes,
“The puzzle rather starkly revealed the gulf between the Platonic world of
logic and our fallen reality: picture a ballroom full of geniuses bent over
stylized maps, carefully placing toy boats…while in the windows the sun goes
down on the actual Kraljevica harbor, standing idle and empty of any ships
whatsoever—and incorrectly solved square on the global economic grid.”
Because he
recognizes the competitive puzzle solving is not the most exciting spectator
sport, Grossman attempts to heighten the atmosphere through metaphor and
hyperbole. He writes that one of the
competitors had a “gunslinger’s stare” and that one had a “receding hairline,
as if the heat from his frontal lobes had burned the hair away from his forehead.” Interestingly enough, Anderson Wang was
mentioned in the article as a potential competitor on U.S. Team A,
having finished 42nd in the competition this year. Ultimately, Grossman not only describes the
world of competitive puzzle solving, but he also helps to reveal why even
average Americans are interested in puzzles as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment