Game theories
by Carrie Frye
The word game Pears launched on Slate at the end of July. It’s an anagram game, similar to Boggle or the New York Times’s Spelling Bee, but a bit more relaxed in its vocabulary—you can play “tarty,” for example, which the prudish Spelling Bee doesn’t allow, alongside beauties like “oobleck” and “migraineur.” There are some other bells and whistles, too, and new words are being added to its dictionary each day, many of them suggested by players, such as “dartitis,” which is evidently “what darts players call the yips.”
As you play, Pears will also pop up the occasional message—song lyrics, emojis, lightly rude remarks. All of this imbues the game with the fizzy, salutary sense of a human hand shaping each day’s new entry.
Dan Kois, the writer and former long-time Slate editor—and contributor to the lovely Flaming Hydra anthology The Awl: The Book!—is the game’s maker. I got in touch with Dan to discuss how Pears came into being.
He told me that he developed the game’s prototype with Slate’s CEO Dan Check, who has a background in product development and “likes to find a way to keep coding now and then.” Developer Jonathan Zuckerman then built both the game, and the editor Kois uses to compose the game each day.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Carrie Frye: When I learned that you were the maker of Pears, I wasn’t surprised as you seem to enjoy playing games.
Dan Kois: I’ve only recently become more of a crossword and word game person, but I am a big board game person and party game person. My family plays a lot of board and card games. I’ve written about board games, and in fact I’m writing a book about Hearts, the card game, right now. And so games have always been a big part of my fun quotient. But I had never gotten involved in the word game world, which I have rapidly learned is its own thriving ecosystem, full of creators and players. And there’s an enormous overlap between those two populations.
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