Sudoku! That’s fun, right?

I like playing Sudoku, probably too much, and I’ve decided I talk about it. I find it fun. It has some merits, and it’s the easiest example I have of something mundane other than traditional books/art having something to say about the world. Before I start, you should check out the history on Wikipedia because I find it kinda funny.

Okay, so to get to the meat of what I want to say, I’ll have to tell you the basics of how to play. There are nine three by three squares. In each of them, and each lateral and horizontal line is no more and no less than one of each single digit number excluding zero. In normal and not nerd English, there are 9 3×3 boxes with 1 through 9 in them. Also each line, both going up/down and left/right have 1 through 9 in them. There is one correct answer for each box, and it’s never ambiguous.

Every game of Sudoku will give you some of the numbers in it but not all of them, and your objective is to fill them in. Most versions of Sudoku (whether in a book or an ad-riddled ap on your smartphone) will have difficulties. It just changes how many numbers are given to you at the beginning and how much you’re not (which is effectively the same thing).

I’m going to skip to the end, from the easiest puzzle to the hardest. You can use logic to answer all your questions, and your question is always “what numbers can’t possibly be in this box?” So why am I bringing it up on this blog where I just spent more than a year watching Star Trek so I could talk about why I like it? Great question, straw man.

Sudoku implies a straightforward, logical universe that allows no deviation. There is no game that cannot be resolved without going through the steps and answering every question. The solution may not be self-evident, but it will emerge sooner or later as long as you diligently follow the checklist. It reminds me of high school councilors, bureaucrats and distant relatives at Thanksgiving. The world falls into neat lines, and you follow procedures to accomplish anything. I totally used to believe in this sort of thinking (for far larger a part of my life than I’d like to admit, even as I studied Latin and Greek). I go to school then college then work because it follows the pattern, is easy and correct to do. Just an aside, it isn’t like I get angry at people who went into computer science. I’m very happy that things worked out for the majority of you (sorry to most of the people who went to Law School). It’s just that the system doesn’t work for a lot of people.

There’s a (what I consider) hilarious SMBC comic that illustrates my point. It’s about how the comfort you can get through job security can outweigh everything else because at least you know what you’re doing and know what you’ll be doing (okay, so I just explained a joke that did it better, but I have more to say). The next thing I’m going to say is that you shouldn’t take pride in your job (just your work). Holy cow, how did I get there from Sudoku? “Hey, Ben,” I hear you say. “You’re a writer! Do you think all your books suck, your writing sucks and therefore this article sucks too?”

Not at all, so I guess I suck at expressing myself. What I mean is that, you should take pride in your passion, which is very often the core of enjoyment in what you do, and then there’s a lot that isn’t your passion. Using myself as an example, what do I like to do? Write. It is the most wholesome, wonderful thing I have yet found in my life. However, there are certain parts I like and then ones that I have to do. For example, I have to worry about blurbs, covers, marketing, networking and a bunch of stuff either I really don’t like doing or am downright awful at. And what do those things have to do with writing? Well, a blurb, I guess, but that’s pretty different, and it’s about selling, not creativity. Even if your passion is to do all that stuff I don’t like to, there’s a bunch of things you would rather not have to do in the name of practicality. My argument is that none of the real world stuff should be what we’re proud of, but some people act like it’s a point of pride. Most often the question I hear when meeting new people is ‘what [job] do you do?’ I’d like to say I write, but that’s little of what I actually do.

I don’t want this to get too long, so I will leave with a few parting messages. I feel like Sudoku indirectly endorses an incomplete perspective on life. Hopefully, this blog post opens someone’s eyes to be more aware of the media/entertainment they consume because the more you understand any one thing is the more you understand of everything, including capital A Art in paintings, books and movies.

Anyway, I started reading Stoner (I once had a class with Freshman that ended at 4:20 PM every day so I can’t even bring myself to make the joke) and here are a pair of quotes from the beginning I like and feel is kinda relevant:

“An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.”

“At thirty his father looked fifty; stooped by labor, he gazed without hope at the arid patch of land that sustained the family from one year to the next.”

After I read back through my blog post, I sound like I’m accusing a fun, simple game of reactionary ideology and being an enemy of the cultural revolution. I’m not saying that at all, just that, like what I said of Lexicon and it acting as a modern allegory and justification of Nazi ideology, these sorts of things are made unintentionally, usually by people who are unable to see the larger picture (and that’s not a flaw, just that they are fixated on their small part of the world). Okay, sometimes that’s not true and everything you suspect of the maker is true, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the case here. Like I said at the beginning, I like playing Sudoku and don’t think about any of this stuff too hard except when I feel like it.