https://www.literacyofpuzzles.com/home daily 1.0 2021-11-09 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/61884ee10776766661403ba9/t/618a9a09d85d6a1fd7b31ca8/1636473412950/purple.png Home - The Language of My Puzzle Games Almost everyone, all around the world, has played a puzzle game of some sort at least once in their lifetime. It is something people of all ages could participate in because there is such a wide variety of them. I always thought puzzle games like word searches or sudoku were simple and easy to understand. A simple activity that did not have much depth to it, but I was wrong. Upon gathering information for this essay, I realized how much language, culture, and social bonds are involved in these activities. How a whole new language can emerge from some puzzle games that only you and another would understand, or maybe even a whole group of people. However, when I was younger I did not really appreciate this unnoticed beauty of puzzle games, or I did not yet understand that language could be found in just about anything. My mother would always tell me to appreciate the small beauties in life, because everything holds meaning. I would just agree and say, “Sí Mami,” but I never thought that puzzle games would affect my life so much, as well as my understanding of literacy and language as a whole. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/61884ee10776766661403ba9/t/6189f27c4214a602e7c5ec57/1636430667943/8442A4EA-ACB1-4427-A627-45FD2A1D05EA_1_105_c.jpeg Home - Word Search The very first puzzle game I remember playing was word search. I enjoyed solving those puzzles like a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon, releasing a beautiful butterfly. It was freeing and comforting for me. A way to escape the overwhelming loudness of city life growing up. My older cousin, Stacy, introduced it to me when I was about 6-7 years old. I had seen her completing one and thought it looked interesting, so I asked if I could help. She explained the rules to me, “You have to look for the words listed on the bottom. They can be found in any direction including horizontal, vertical, diagonal, left, right, up, and down.” After that, I asked her to complete a word search puzzle with me every day after school. We even started creating our own “code language” for the direction we found the words in. “One arriba” meant one up (word going in an upward direction) and “One abajo” meant one down (word going in a downward direction). Then we just used “one diagonal, horizontal, and vertical” for words we found going in those directions. What was interesting is that neither of us were fluent in spanish. In my household we use a lot of “spanglish” or as others would say, “broken english.” It is what we grew up hearing, so it made sense to us. Hearing “one arriba” was not as foreign to me as it would be to a stranger who does not understand our word search Spanglish language. We were fluent in that language and through it my cousin and I grew a stronger bond. We could easily switch from our Spanglish code to a random topic while completing a puzzle, and people who did not understand looked at us with a face of awe mixed with a dash of confusion. Even today, we know that when we sit down together and complete a word search, we are both completely literate in our word search Spanglish language, and that brings me a warm sense of comfort. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/61884ee10776766661403ba9/t/618a81b96e426d31e3503a07/1636473655568/Untitled.png Home - Sudoku On a more humorous note, is the second puzzle game I was introduced to growing up, Sudoku. I say it is humorous because there are many laughable situations surrounding this game for me, despite its seemingly boring appearance. My mother was the first person to introduce sudoku to me. She had originally started playing it on the train to work as a way to kill time, and when she finished she kept it in her black worn out purse untill she got home. As many other curious kids would, I scavenged her purse for candy since she would sometimes bring some home from her job. However, instead of a mouthwatering bag of tropical skittles, I found a book full of strangely placed numbers in little boxes, inside of bigger boxes. It was confusing, yet intriguing, so I asked my mother if she could explain what it was to me. Thinking it would be simple I listened to my mother, “There are 9 boxes that contain numbers from 1-9. Some numbers are missing from each box, which is what you must fill in. The catch is that each row going horizontally and vertically has to also contain the numbers 1-9 and cannot repeat any one number.” The words began to go in one ear and out the other, like the powder sugar that would flow through the sifter when my mother and I baked. That’s what I started thinking about when I could not understand what she was saying, baking, candy, toys, tv, a different and seemingly simpler puzzle game. Nonetheless, I still wanted to learn because my mother would write those numbers on the grids quite gracefully, making it look easy. Little by little, I started to pick up on the patterns in the game. How to look through each row and box to find any missing numbers and to check that no number has been repeated. How to guess where a number would most likely end up based on the placement of other numbers. I had become fluent in the formal language of sudoku, so much so that when I introduced it to my little brother, we made up our own special code for the game. The big boxes were called burgers and the tiny boxes that contained each number were called seeds. We started this after having cheese burgers for dinner and then playing sudoku, jokingly calling the boxes burgers, but it stood. It is two small phrases that seem extremely silly but when I ask my brother, “Hey, want to play burgers and seeds?”, he answers instantly knowing exactly what I am referring to. Sure we know the correct terminology of the game, but it is our special sudoku code language that makes it that much more memorable and meaningful.