Backstory | Crostic Nines ⑨

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The rationale

Crostic Nines was originally conceived as a fun addition to the growing list of daily games available on Gemini, and as an enjoyable programming project.

Nine ⑨

The name "Crostic Nines" is inspired by the phrase "casting out nines", which is the process of adding the digits of a number together, generally to test the number's divisibility by nine. In this game, you "cast out nines" by using the regular clues to find the words that intersect the "crostic nine", piecing it together one guess at a time.

Nine is a nice number. It's the highest single-digit integer, it represents completeness and fulfillment, it does fun math tricks, and it also holds some significance for Bahá'ís. Around the time when the Bahá'í Faith first arose in the 19th century, it was common to use a system of numerology—the practice of associating numbers to letters and words—to add layers of deeper meaning to written texts. "Bahá'", which is the root of the word "Bahá'í", has a numerical value of nine according to this system.

Design decisions

The game is meant to be a light-hearted yet challenging game that promotes deep thought while avoiding unnecessary frustration. During early development, it became clear that it was easy for players to get stuck if they didn't want to make things easy by searching for the definitions. The mechanic of revealing letters from incorrect guesses that are in the right position came about as a way to address this, as did the hint system.

How it was made

Crostic Nines is made of two things: a Python script hacked together in about a week of downtime, and a word list.

The word list

The game uses a custom list of 5,300 words taken from three different Bahá'í sources:

1. "The Promise of World Peace", by the Universal House of Justice (1985): a widely distributed treatise on the need for, and the inevitability of, universal peace.

2. "The Advent of Divine Justice", by Shoghi Effendi (1938): a lengthy letter describing the high spiritual destiny of the United States of America and the means to attain it.

3. "The Secret of Divine Civilization", by 'Abdu'l-Bahá (1875): a treatise on modernity and the improvement of the degraded conditions prevalent in Persia around the close of the 19th century.

As a first step in finding a good number of suitable words for the puzzle, a frequency analysis was done on all three texts. Only words which appeared less than five times were retained. Next, words longer than twelve letters or shorter than six letters were removed. Then, the lists from all three texts were combined and duplicates removed. After this, the list was fed into a script that generated definitions of each term using the WordNet API. Finally, the definitions were manually corrected for grammar and sensibility.

Why a custom word list, and why these sources? Mainly because the game was intended to go up on the Bahá'í.FYI Gemini capsule, so it made sense to have a Bahá'í connection. Also, originality. :P

The script

The script was originally written as a regular, interactive Python script, and was later rewritten as a CGI script.

[source code link coming soon]

Acknowledgements

Crostic Nines would not have been possible without support and contributions from:

skyjake, creator of the Lagrange Gemini client, the Gmcapsule server, and Bubble (where discussion of the game took place);

stack, creator of Spellbinding and Wordo, and gritty, creator of Farkle, for hints and tips;

jrenken, for hosting and BOFH—uh, sysadmin duties;

bahai.org, for hosting the texts used to create word lists;

...and many more for their feedback, praise and encouragement!

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