My grandson and I spent about 2 hours playing Garten of BanBan 3 this morning, trying to get through the room where you have to revive Nabnaleena by injecting her with compounds you create by mixing colors.This requires going through multiple loops of the same actions within a time limit and maybe some other conditions.

It’s very annoying. Neither of us could complete the tasks quickly enough even when we seemed to have done so with maximum efficiency.

Here’s the secret — although it contradicts in-game instructions and guides by other players.

You are led to believe that the sequence of events is:

1. Grab the hypodermic
2. Go across the room to see what color compound you have to make, and press the two right colors to make it. (Check the chart to the left.)
3. Click the button to start the mixing. At the end, it will fill t he hypodermic.
4. Click on the unconscious Nabnaleena to rouse her.
5. Scurry to the other side of the room and click on the drone controller.
6. Click whichever of the three red wall lights are on.
7. Go back to where the drone controller was and pick up the wrench-y looking object. (It turns out that it’s “surgical tongs.”)
8. Go over to the wall with the twelve tubes of many colors, and click on each to turn it green. (It takes three clicks to turn a red tube green, two for yellow, and one for blue.)
9. Return to step 1
10. Repeat until you have completed the right number of cycles. The room will go green and the door will, at last, open.

If you think that’s annoying, there’s also the fact that at least for us the cycle would never complete.

One of the walkthroughs I watched finally revealed the solution: Never do steps #7 or #8; ignore the wall of tubes. That will give you enough time to complete the required number of cycles — four in our case . Despite the instructions on the wall, the tubes section plays no part in the game.

At least not for us.

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There’s a new version of Wordle called Semantle — not one that I “predicted” — that wants you to find the target word by looking not for a chain of spellings but a chain of semantics. For example, if you started with the word “child” you might get to the answer as follows:

1. Child
2. Play
3. game
4. Chess
5. Square
6. Circle
7. Donut
8. Homer

In short, you’re playing word associations except the associations can be very loose. It’s not like Twenty Questions where, once you get down a track (say “animals”), you’re narrowing the scope until there’s only one thing left. In Semantle, the associations can take a sudden turn in any of a thousand directions at any moment.

Which means it’s basically impossible to win.

It is, however, a good introduction to how machine learning “thinks” about words. Or at least one of the ways. Semantle is based on word2vec, which creates text embeddings derived from an analysis of some large — sometimes very very large — set of texts. Text embeddings map the statistical relationships among words based on their proximities in those texts.

In a typical example, word2vec may well figure out that “queen” and “king” are semantically close, which also might well let it figure out that “king” is to “prince” as “queen” is to “princess.”

But there are, of course, many ways that words can be related — different axes of similarity, different dimensions. Those are called “vectors” (as in “word2vec“). When playing Semantle, you’re looking for the vectors in which a word might be embedded. There are many, many of those, some stronger than others. For example, “king” and “queen” share a dimension, but so do “king” and “chess”, “king” and “bed size”, and “king” and “elvis.” Words branch off in many more ways than in Wordle.

For example, in my first game of Semantle, after 45 attempts to find a word that is even a little bit close to the answer, I found that “city” is vaguely related to it. But now I have to guess at the vector “city” and the target share. The target could be “village”, “busy”, “taxi”, “diverse”, “noisy”, “siege”, or a bazillion other words that tend to appear relatively close to “city” but that are related in different ways.

In fact, I did not stumble across the relevant vector. The answer was “newspaper.”

I think Semantle would be more fun if they started you with a word that was at some reasonable distance from the answer, rather than making you guess what a reasonable starting word might be. Otherwise, you can spend a long time — 45 tries to get “city” — just generating random words. But if we knew a starting word was, say, “foot”, we could start thinking of vectors that that word is on: measure, toe, body, shoe, soccer, etc. That might be fun, and would stretch our minds.

As it is, Semantle is a game the unplayability of which teaches us an important lesson.

And now I shall wait to hear from the many people who are actually able to solve Semantles. I hate you all with a white hot and completely unreasonable passion.[1]

[1] I’ve heard from people who are solving it. I no longer hate them.

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There’s Wordle for Jews: Jewdle. There’s Wordle for Star Wars enthusiasts: SWordle. And lord knows how many variants are now online or are being developed by anyone who knows how to edit a word list.

So let’s just get it over with. Here are upcoming versions, some of which probably already exist but I am too lazy to check.

Aordle: Wordle for cardiologists

Boardle: Wordle for millennials taking a break from playing Settlers of Catan

Boredle: Wordle for people playing Wordle

Cawdle: Wordle for crows

Chordle: Wordle rhythm guitarists

Clawdle: Wordle for manicurists

Cordle: Wordle for electricians

Coredle: Wordle for people taking Antarctic ice samples

Corridordle: Wordle for people hanging out in hallways

Crawdle: Wordle for eyes, ear, and throat doctors

Dawdle: Wordle for dillydallyers

Depordle: Wordle for ICE

Doordle: Wordle for doormen/doorpeople

Drawdle: Wordle for gunslingers

Eeyordle: Wordle for depressed people

Floordle: Wordle for linoleum salespeople

Flourdle: Wordle for bakers

Fordle: Wordle for F-150 owners

Fodordle: Wordle for travel advisors

Frodordle: Wordle for hairy-footed denizens of Middle Earth

Glowdle: Wordle for nuclear power plant employees

Growdle: Wordle for people who are cultivating marijuana for personal use

Hoardle: Wordle for hoarders

IOrdle: Wordle for computer engineers

Ignordle: Wordle for people who don’t do Wordle puzzles

Jordle: Wordle for kingdoms bordering Israel

KOrdle: Wordle for boxers

Lordle: Wordle for evangelical Christians

Majordle: Wordle for Army officers

Maordle: Wordle for Chinese Communists

Mayordle: Wordle for leaders of cities

Mayordle: Wordle for lovers of fatty white sandwich condiments

Minordle: Wordle for underrepresented populations

Mordordle: Wordle for the inhabitants of the Dark Kingdom of Middle Earth

Motordle: Wordle for car mechanics

Murdordle: Wordle for serial killers

Nordle: Wordle for Scandinavians

Nordle: Wordle for naysayers

Oordle: Wordle for the over-enthusiastic

Phylordle: Wordle for biological taxonomists

Poordle: Wordle for those who cannot afford a NY Times subscription to do a stupid word game

Pourdle: Wordle for sommeliers

Psuedordle: Wordle for people with imposter syndrome

Repordle: Wordle for journalists

Rappordle: Wordle for empathists

Rupordle: Wordle for the Murdochs

Rumordle: Wordle for gossips

Sawdle: Wordle for carpenters

Slaudle: Wordle for merciless mass killers

Sordle: Wordle for first-time horseback riders

Sprawdle: Wordle for suburban real estate developers

Strawdle: Wordle for scarecrows

Tordle: Wordle for turtle and turtle relatives

Thordle: Wordle for Asgardians

Vaulde: Wordle for gymnasts

Worldle: Wordle for geographers

XORdle: Wordle for machine language programmers

Yordle: Wordle for turtle monarchs

Zoordle: Wordle for imprisoned animals

Zorrordle: Wordle for fencers

The comments are open for your additions. (Note: Keep ’em unhurtful.)

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Digital Extremes wants to break the trend of live-service games meticulously planning years of content ahead of time using road maps…’What happens then is you don’t have a surprise and you don’t have a world that feels alive,’ [community director Rebecca] Ford says. ‘You have a product that feels like a result of an investor’s meeting 12 months ago.'”

— Steven Messner, “This Means War,” PC Gamer, Feb. 2020, p. 34

Video games have been leading indicators for almost forty years. It was back in the early 1980s that games started welcoming modders who altered the visuals, turning Castle Wolfenstein into Castle Smurfenstein, adding maps, levels, cars, weapons, and rules to game after game. Thus the games became more replayable. Thus the games became whatever users wanted to make them. Thus games — the most rule-bound of activities outside of a law court or a tea ceremony — became purposefully unpredictable.

Rebecca Ford is talking about Warframe, but what she says about planning and road maps points the way for what’s happening with business strategies overall. The Internet has not only gotten us used to an environment that is overwhelming and unpredictable, but we’ve developed approaches that let us leverage that unpredictability, from open platforms to minimum viable products to agile development.

The advantage of strategy is that it enables an organization to focus its attention and resources on a single goal. The disadvantages are that strategic planning assumes that the playing field is relatively stable, and that change general happens according to rules that we can know and apply. But that stability is a dream. Now that we have tech that lets us leverage unpredictability, we are coming to once again recognize that strategies work almost literally by squinting our eyes so tight that they’re almost closed.

Maybe games will help us open our eyes so that we do less strategizing and more playing.

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From Jane Wakefield at the BBC:

Its 11th International Classification of Diseases (ICD) will include the condition “gaming disorder”.

The draft document describes it as a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour so severe that it takes “precedence over other life interests”.

Oy. IMO, this will go down in history as a ludicrous example of the hysteria we’re living through, which I take as strong evidence of the depth of the changes the Internet is bringing. It’ll be the example of cultural hysteria mentioned after the anti-comic-book hysteria of the 1950s.

That’s not to deny that some people suffer from the symptoms listed. But we don’t have a disease called “fingernail addiction” because some people chew their nails compulsively. Or TV addiction. These obsessive behaviors are (in my non-expert opinion) expressions of other issues, not caused by the object of the obsession. Or else games are a peculiarly finicky addictive substance. If only heroin were so selective!

Pardon me, but I left my character in Tom Clancy’s Wildlands
sitting on the edge of an airfield, awaiting her 37th attempt to steal that frigging airplane.

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I’ve long wondered — like for a couple of decades — when software developers who write algorithms that produce beautiful animations of water will be treated with the respect accorded to painters who create beautiful paintings of water. Both require the creators to observe carefully, choose what they want to express, and apply their skills to realizing their vision. When it comes to artistic vision or merit, are there any serious differences?

In the January issue of PC Gamer , Philippa Warr [twitter: philippawarr] — recently snagged
from Rock, Paper, Shotgun points to v r 3 a museum of water animations put together by Pippin Barr. (It’s conceivable that Pippin Barr is Philippa’s hobbit name. I’m just putting that out there.) The museum is software you download (here) that displays 24 varieties of computer-generated water, from the complex and realistic, to simple textures, to purposefully stylized low-information versions.

Philippa also points to the Seascape
page by Alexander Alekseev where you can read the code that procedurally produces an astounding graphic of the open sea. You can directly fiddle with the algorithm to immediately see the results. (Thank you, Alexander, for putting this out under a Creative Commons license.) Here’s a video someone made of the result:

Philippa also points to David Li’s Waves where you can adjust wind, choppiness, and scale through sliders.

More than ten years ago we got to the point where bodies of water look stunning in video games. (Falling water is a different question.) In ten years, perhaps we’ll be there with hair. In the meantime, we should recognize software designers as artists when they produce art.

 

---

 

Good work, PC Gamer, in increasing the number of women reviewers, and especially as members of your editorial staff. As a long-time subscriber I can say that their voices have definitely improved the magazine. More please!

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I’m at the STEAM ed Finland conference in Jyväskylä where Ulla Richardson is going to talk about GraphoLearn, an adaptive learning method for learning to read.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

Ulla has been working on the Jyväskylä< Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD). Globally, one third of people can’t read or have poor reading skills. One fifth of Europe also. About 15% of children have learning disabilities.

One Issue: knowing which sound goes with which letters. GraphoLearn is a game to help students with this, developed by a multidisciplinary team. You learn a word by connecting a sound to a written letter. Then you can move to syllables and words. The game teaches by trial and error. If you get it wrong, it immediately tells you the correct sound. It uses a simple adaptive approach to select the wrong choices that are presented. The game aims at being entertaining, and motivates also with points and rewards. It’s a multi-modal system: visual and audio. It helps dyslexics by training them on the distinctions between sounds. Unlike human beings, it never displays any impatience.

It adapts to the user’s skill level, automatically assessing performance and aiming at at 80% accuracy so that it’s challenging but not too challenging.

13,000 players have played in Finland, and more in other languages. Ulla displays data that shows positive results among students who use GraphoLearn, including when teaching English where every letter has multiple pronunciations.

There are some difficulties analyzing the logs: there’s great variability in how kids play the game, how long they play, etc. There’s no background info on the students. [I missed some of this.] There’s an opportunity to come up with new ways to understand and analyze this data.

Q&A

Q: Your work is amazing. When I was learning English I could already read Finnish, so I made natural mispronunciations of ape, anarchist, etc. How do you cope with this?

A: Spoken and written English are like separate languages, especially if Finnish is your first language where each letter has only one pronunciation. You need a bigger unit to teach a language like English. That’s why we have the Rime approach where we show the letters in more context. [I may have gotten this wrong.]

Q: How hard is it to adapt the game to each language’s logic?

A: It’s hard.

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Berkman

Kishonna Gray [#KishonnaGray] is giving a Berkman-Klein [#BKCHarvard] Tuesday lunch talk . She’s an ass’t prof and ML King Scholar at MIT as well as being a fellow at BKC and the author of Race, Gender and Deviance in Xbox Live. She’s going to talk about a framework, Black Digital Feminism.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

She begins by saying, “I’ve been at a cross roads, personally and intellectually” over the Trump election, the death of black civilians at the hand of police, and the gaming controversies, including gamergate. How did we get to this point? And what point are we at? “What matters most in this moment?” She’s going to talk about the framework that helps her make sense of some of these things.

Imagine we’re celebrating the 50th birthday of the Berkman Klein Center (in 305 yrs or so)? What are we celebrating? The end of online harassment? The dismantling of heteronormative, white supremacy hierarchy? Are we telling survivor narratives?

She was moved by an article the day after the election, titled “Black women were the only ones who tried to save the world Tuesday night,” by Charles D. Ellison. She laughed at first, and retweeted it. She was “overwhelmed by the response of people who didn’t think black women have the capacity to do anything except make babies and collect welfare checks.” She recalled many women, including Sojourner Truth who spoke an important truth to a growing sense in the feminist movement that it was fundamentally a white movement. The norms are so common and hidden that when we notice them we ask how the women broke through the barriers rather than asking why the barriers were there in the first place. It’s as if these women are superhuman. But we need to ask why are there barriers in the first place? [This is a beautifully composed talk. I’m sorry to be butchering it so badly. It will be posted on line in a few days.

In 1869 Frederick Douglass argued that including women in the movement for the vote would reduce the chances of the right to vote being won for black men. “White womenhood has been central in defining white masculinity. ” E.g., in Birth of a Nation, white women need protection. Self-definition is the core of intersectionality. Masculinity has mainly protected its own interests and its own fragility, not women. It uses the protection of women to showcase its own dominance.

“Why do we have to insert our own existences into spaces? Why are we not recognized?.” The marginalized are no longer accepting their marginzalization. For example,look at black women’s digital practices.

Black women have used digital involvement to address marginalization, to breach the boundaries of what’s “normal.” Often that is looked upon as them merely “playing around” with tech. The old frameworks meant that black women couldn’t enter the digital space as who they actually are.

Black Digital Feminism has three elements:

1. Social structural oppression of technology and virtual spaces. Many digital spaces are dominated by assumptions that they are color-blind. Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name are attempts to remind us that blackness is not an intrusion.

2. Intersectional oppressions experience in virtual spaces. Women must work to dismantle the interlocking structures of oppression. Individuals experience oppression in different ways and we don’t want a one-size approach. E.g., the “solidarity is for white women” hashtag is seen as an expression of black women being angry, but it is a reminder that feminism has too often been assumed to be a white issue first.

3. The distinctness of the virtual feminist community. Black Digital Feminism privileges women’s ways of knowing. “NotYourAsianSidekick” is rooted in the radical Asian woman tradition, insisting that they control their own identity. Black women, and others, reject the idea that feminism is the same for all women, disregarding the different forms of oppression women are subject to based upon their race, ethnicity, etc. Women have used social media for social change and to advance critical activism and feminism.

The tenets of Black Digital Feminism cannot detach from the personal, communal, or political, which sets it part from techno- and cyber-feminism.

These new technologies are not creating anything. They are providing an outlet. “These groups have never been voiceless. The people in power simply haven’t been listening.” The digital amplifies these voices.

QA

Q: With the new administration, should we be thinking differently?

A: We need to identify the commonalities. Isolated marches won’t do enough. We need to find a way to bring communities together by figuring out what is the common struggle against structural oppression. Black women sacrificed to support Trump, forgetting the “super-predator” stuff from Hillary, but other groups didn’t make equivalent sacrifices.

Q: Does it mean using hashtags differently?

A: This digital culture is only one of many things we can do. We can’t forget the physical community, connecting with people. There are models for doing this.

Q: Did Net Neutrality play a role in enabling the Black community to participate? Do we need to look at NN from a feminist perspective…NN as making every packet have the same weight.

NN was key for enabling Black Lives Matter because the gov’t couldn’t suppress that movement’s language, its speech.

Q: Is this perceived as a danger insider the black feminist movement?

A: Tech isn’t neutral, is the idea. It lets us do what we need to do.

Q: Given the work you’ve done on women finding pleasure in spaces (like the Xbox) where they’re not expected to be found, what do you think about our occupying commercial spaces?

A: I’m a lifelong gamer and I get asked how I can play where there aren’t players — or developers — who look like me. I started the practice of highlighting the people who are there. We’re there, but we’re not noticed. E.g., Pew Research showed recently that half of gamers are women. The overwhelming population of console gamers are black and brown men. We really have to focus on who is in the spaces, and seek them out. My dissertation focused on finding these people, and finding their shared stories: not being noticed or valued. But we should take the extra steps to make sure we locate them. Some people are going to call 2016 the year of the black gamer, games with black protagonists. This is due to a push from marginalized games. The resistance is paying off. Even the Oscars So White has paid off in a more diverse Golden Globes nominees set.

Q: You navigate between feminist theory and observational work. How did the latter shape the former?

A: When I learned about ethnography I thought it was the most beautiful thing ever created — being immersed in a community and let them tell their own stories. But when it came time to document that, I realized why we sometimes consider ethnography to be voyeuristic and exploitative. When transcribing, I was expected to “clean up” the speech. “Hell no,” she said. E.g. she left “dem” as “dem,” not “them.” “I refer to people as narrators, not ‘research participants.'” They’re part of the process. She showed them the chapter drafts. E.g., she hasn’t published all her Ferguson work because she wants to make sure that she “leaves the place better.” You have to stay true to the transformative, liberatory practices that we say we’re doing.” She’s even been criticized for writing too plainly, eschewing academic jargon. “I wanted to make sure that a community that let me into its space understood every word that I wrote.”

Q: There’s been debate about the people who lead the movement. E.g., if I’m not black, I am not best suited to lead the movement in the fight for those rights. OTOH, if we want to advance the rights of women, we have to move the whole society with us.

A: What you’re saying is important. I stopped caring about hurting peole’s feelings because if they’re devoted to the work that needs to be done, they’ve checked their feelings, their fragility, at the door. There is tons of work for allies to do. If it’s a real ally dedicated to the work, they’ll understand. There’s so much work to do. And Trump isn’t even the president yet.

Q: About the application of Black Digital Feminism to the law. (Intersectionality started in law journals.)

A: It’s hard to see how it translates into actual policy, especially now. I don’t know how we’ll push back against what’s to come. E.g., we know evaluations of women are usually lower than of men. So when are we going to stop valuing the evaluations so highly? At the bottom of my evaluations, I write, “Just so you know, these evaluations are filtered through my black woman’s body.”

Q: What do we get things like”#IamMichelle”, which is like the “I am Spartacus” in the movie Spartacus?

A: It depends on the effect it has. I focus on marginalized folks, and their sense of empowerment and pride. There’s some power there, especially in localized communities.

Q: How can white women be supportive?

A: You’ve to go get your people, the white women who voted. What have you done to change the thinking of the women you know who voted for Trump? That’s where it has to begin. You have to first address your own circle. You may not be able to change them, but you can’t ignore them. That’s step one.

Q: I always like your work because you hearken back to a rich pedigree of black feminism. But the current moment is distinct. E.g., the issues are trans-national. So we need new visions for what we want the future. What is the future that we’re fighting for? What does the digital contribute to that vision?

A: It’s important to acknowledge what’s the same. E.g., the death of black people by police is part of the narrative of lynching. The structural and institutional inequalities are the same. Digital tools let us address this differently. BLM is no different from what happened with Rodney King. What future are we fighting for? I guess I haven’t articulated that. I don’t know how we get there. We should first ask how we transform our own spaces. I don’t want the conversation to get to big. The conservation should be small enough and digestible. We don’t want people to feel helpless.

Q: If I’m a man who asks about Black Digital Feminism [which he is], where can I learn more?

You can go to my Web site: www.kishonnaGray.com. And the Berkman Klein community is awesome and ready to go to work.

Q: You write about the importance of claiming identity online. Early on, people celebrated the fact that you could go online without a known identity. Especially now, how do you balance the important task of claiming identity and establishing solidarity with your smaller group, and bonding with your allies in a larger group? Do we need to shift the balance?

A: I haven’t figured out how to create that balance. The communities I’m in are still distinct. When Mike Brown was killed, I realized how distinct the anti-gamergate crowd was from the BLM. These are not opposing fights. They’re not so distinct that we can’t fight both at the same times. I ended up working with both, and got me thinking about how to bridge them. But I haven’t figured out how to bring them together.

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Stephanie Mendoza [twitter:@_liooil] [Github: SAM-liooil] is giving a talk at the Web 1.0 conference. She’s a Unity developer.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

WebVR— a 3D in-browser standard— is at 1.0 these days, she says.. It’s cross platform which is amazing because it’s hard to build for Web, Android, and Vive. It’s “uncharted territory” where “everything is an experiment.” You need Chromium
, an experimental version of Chrome, to run it. She uses A-Frame to create in-browser 3D environments.

“We’re trying to figure out the limit of things we can simulate.” It’s going to follow us out into the real world. E.g., she’s found that “Simulating fearful situations ) can lessen fear of those situations in the real world”simulating fearful situations (e.g., heights) can lessen fear of those situations in the real world.

This crosses into Meinong’s jungle: a repository of non-existent entities in Alexius Meinong‘s philosophy.

The tool they’re using is A-Frame, which is an abstraction layer on top of WebGL
, Three.js, and VRML. (VRML was an HTML standard that didn’t get taken up much because the browsers didn’t run it very well. [I was once on the board of a VRML company which also didn’t do very well.]) WebVR works on Vibe, High Fidelity, Janus, the Unity Web player, and Youtube 360, under different definitions of “works.” A-Frame is open source.

Now she takes us through how to build a VR Web page. You can scavenge for 3D assets or create your own. E.g., you can go to Thingiverse and convert the files to the appropriate format for A-Frame.

Then you begin a “scene” in A-Frame, which lives between <a-scene> tags in HTML. You can create graphic objects (spheres, planes, etc.) You can interactively work on the 3D elements within your browser. [This link will take you to a page that displays the 3D scene Stephanie is working with, but you need Chromium to get to the interactive menus.]

She goes a bit deeper into the A-Frame HTML for assets, light maps, height maps, specular maps, all of which are mapped back to much lower-count polygons. Entities consist of geometry, light, mesh, material, position, and raycaster, and your extensions. [I am not attempting to record the details, which Stephanie is spelling out clearly. ]

She talks about the HTC Vive. “The controllers are really cool. “They’re like claws. I use them to climb virtual trees and then jump out”They’re like claws. I use them to climb virtual trees and then jump out because it’s fun.” Your brain simulates gravity when there is none, she observes. She shows the A-Frame tags for configuring the controls, including gabbing, colliding, and teleporting.

She recommends some sites, including NormalMap, which maps images and lets you download the results.

QA

Q: Platforms are making their own non-interoperable VR frameworks, which is concerning.

A: It went from art to industry very quickly.

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(Prepare for the most first worldly of all problems.)

The New York Times Puns and Anagrams puzzles are a national embarrassment. Pardon my bluntness, but I’m a truth teller.

The clues in the British version provide a definition and a clever, hidden way of constructing the word. The NYT version sometimes does but sometimes just has the cleverness.

For example, in yesterday’s NYT Puns and Anagrams puzzle [SPOILERS AHEAD], the clue for 48 Down is “Fill time on stage again.” The answer is “revamp” because to fill time on stage is to vamp, and to do it again is to add “re” to it. But there’s no definition of “revamp” in the clue. In the British style, it might have been “Do over once again to fill time on stage.”

Another example: 57A “Fire starter” is “bon.” For the Brits it could have been something like “Good French fire starter.”

Adding the definition usually makes the clues harder, and thus more satisfying to solve. Sure, the definition is in them, which should make them easier, but that information becomes noise because with a good clue, you can’t tell which is the definition and which is the hint. When you can tell — e.g., when words in the clue seem oddly chosen, they may be there as an anagram — the clue gets easier, but that’s just fun getting even a little more meta.

And while I have your attention, let’s work to slow global climate change. Or, as the Brits might put it, “Climate activist may ogle sun god.” Answer: ogle + ra = Al Gore. See, wasn’t that fun? No. Ok, good point.

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