What’s in a Name?

There are few morning rituals more regarded than a cup of coffee and a crossword puzzle. Your ritual may be to solve your puzzle before starting your day, to wind down at night with it, or blame it for your daytime procrastination. No matter the time-of-day, crosswords are a part of our lives and we miss them when hanging out in Black Rock City. There were whispers in our village in the spring of 2019 about an event space for crossword lovers and when it became clear there would be a Burn in 2022 the whispers quickly became intentions and our group of enthusiasts hopped on a zoom to kick things off.

After some introductions, we began by brainstorming the range of activities that we wanted to offer. Would it be just crosswords? No, although crosswords were an essential part of our collective vision, we also wanted to offer participants more opportunities for wordplay. Also, with Wordle rocketing into the cultural milieu we knew that our fellow Burners would be needing their daily fix as badly as a morning cup of coffee. Speaking of coffee, we would need to have that too, especially in the morning for early risers who want their coffee and crossword before venturing onto the playa.

Before we could sink our teeth into the work of manifesting our vision, we needed the most important thing that would tie all the components of our project together, a name! As a bunch of self-proclaimed word geeks, we could not take this casually. It is no surprise that a first round of brainstorming yielded no clear winner. We wanted a way to get consensus without falling victim to analysis paralysis.

As Word Geeks and Numbers Geeks are kissing cousins our solution was to use a spreadsheet to quantify the process of choosing a name. We listed all the names we could think of (no bad ideas) into a spreadsheet and then each of us were invited to rank all the options ranging from 0 for “I hate this name” to “3” for “I love it”. From there we added across the columns and ranked the names from most to least popular. Though there was some discussion of alternatives, we ultimately gelled around the top ranking name. From there, the Word Play Café was born.

We look forward to sharing our process with you between now and the main event. And, if there is a game you’d like to see at the Café email us to let us know.