The making of the cult favorite game, "Spelling Bee"

Brut America

It's the puzzle game everyone is obsessed with.  Brut spoke to the digital puzzle editor of The New York Times on making the internet's nerdiest word game "Spelling Bee."

Transcript

00:00I am convinced at heart that anybody can be a puzzle person.

00:04It is such a great way to scratch certain itches in your brain that you didn't know that you could scratch.

00:16It's how many words can you find using the seven letters in each day's hive.

00:22But the catch is letters can be used more than once and every word you find must include the center letter.

00:29We actually ran a spelling bee on Valentine's Day and one of the pangrams was valentine.

00:36Funny enough, there's also a second pangram, right? There's ventilate.

00:40Who knew that you could make both those words with the same seven letters? Why not?

00:44That's another 16 points your way.

00:51Part of the editing comes with pruning the word list, I should say.

00:56Which is, I am asking myself what feels fair for a widespread audience.

01:03Whether you are a younger or older solver, a beginner solver or an expert, a word game maven,

01:10I want you to be able to strive for whatever spelling bee tier works for you.

01:15In doing my research, I have dictionaries at my disposal. I do not edit this word list as a gut check.

01:22I'm simply making calls based on what the dictionaries are showing me.

01:27I like using Google's news tab a lot.

01:29My goal is to see word games and other puzzle games take a direction where they can really appeal to

01:36and employ so many different voices, so many different backgrounds,

01:41so that we can continue to shape games for, truthfully, everybody out there.

01:53I'm still like a kid in a candy store every time I have a puzzle published.

01:57Crosswords are how I got my start.

01:59I joke that I have an awful work-life balance because I still make crosswords in my spare time.

02:04I can't help myself. Crosswords are my first love.

02:07They're how I got into this. Anybody can submit a puzzle to the Times.

02:11So, I have been avidly, amateurly and then semi-professionally been constructing puzzles since high school.

02:19I had my first puzzle published in the New York Times when I was 17 years old.

02:28I could not have expected Spelling Bee, as passionate as I am about this game,

02:33to have been such a smashing success, a real craze in 2020, 2021 and beyond.

02:39I think it's the type of game that you want to discuss further.

02:43Whether you are an avid player who picks apart the word list on a given day, which is completely fine,

02:48or whether you're just like, it is a puzzle that you can all come together and solve.

03:00For starters, no vulgar slang or outright slurs. Those are instant no-goes.

03:06Also, and this seems to trip people up from time to time,

03:09No capitalized proper name. Of course, there are exceptions to this that might be confusing.

03:13Did you know that Manhattan, when referring to the drink, is actually stylized lowercase, per Merriam-Webster?

03:27Tell me something that's an absolute flex to a niche group, but means nothing to the majority.

03:34The girls that get it, get it.

03:36The girls that get it, get it.

03:38Not too many Queen Bee solvers out there on a given day.

03:41Very, very, very small subset.

03:43So, give yourself a pat on the back if you've ever managed to achieve Queen Bee,

03:47finding every last word out there on a given day.

03:50There's something so satisfying about just chipping away at moving up toward success.

03:56Being able to have a modal that says,

04:00or awesome, this many more points, congratulations, keep going.

04:05And I think there's just something so comforting about that.

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