Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad

Raph Koster · 2 Sept 2023

Raph Koster did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
A puzzle whose categories can only be seen by the broadly educated is elitist by construction.

Their wordsBut it’s fundamentally elitist — it basically requires you to have a broad education to find the categories in the first place.
Our reading
A puzzle that invites guessing and then punishes wrong guesses stops the player learning the very method it could have taught.
Mental modelDesign is how it works

Their wordsFundamentally, the game invites you to make guesses, but punishes you for them — and a missed guess doesn’t help you prune the logic space, only the trivia space.

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