I've spent a lot of hours on Chihuahua over the past couple of years, so my problem in writing about it is to keep it succinct, and avoid going into excessive detail. I'm not sure how well I've succeeded in the following. Feel free to skim.
Like many of us, I've been playing the Target puzzle in the newspaper for a long time, in my case, in the Melbourne
Age. See
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/puzzles/target.html. Presumably the puzzle is syndicated, but the poor old puzzle-maker gets no credit. Target has obviously been around for a long time: in
The Penguin Book of Word Games, published 25 years ago, David Parlett said it had been appearing in the
Daily Express for "some years".
We used to do it mainly on the weekend, and come back to it from time to time during the day when a word had suddenly come to mind. Some of our friends did it too, and if we were talking on the phone someone might ask, "Have you got the big word yet?" When people suggested I create a computer version, I was reluctant at first, because I thought there were too many similar games already in existence. But gradually I started thinking that an online puzzle with a daily cycle and a scoreboard would be different from anything else around.
Then in 2005 Web design people started talking about a technique called Ajax, which could produce quite complex interactive applications that would run on a Web site without the user needing any special plug-ins on their computer. As a test of how well this technology would work for online games, I decided to create a daily word-building puzzle, and Chihuahua was the eventual result. This was an early draft of the layout:
I put quite a bit of effort into creating a word list for the new game. I felt that a lot of available lists were much too big and included too many rare words. I already had a list of 3- and 4-letter words that I had built up for my
Letterbox game. I wanted a list of 5- to 9- letter words of a similar character. My goal was to identify the words that educated people in English-speaking communities would have a reasonable chance of knowing. Since I've relied on my own judgement in selecting words, the list in practice comprises the words recognised (at least vaguely) by me.
Eventually I had a list of 35,000 4- to 9-letter words (excluding inflections made by adding "S"). I then made a fateful decision: I would also make use of a much larger list, called YAWL. This added 70,000 words to the list, but these 70,000 would be used only in a supplementary role. The puzzle targets and solutions would all be based on my word list, but if a player happened to try a word that was in YAWL, that would be permitted. I honestly didn't expect that many of the more obscure words would be played by anyone. How wrong I was!
Very soon after the game went online, people started scoring way above the "Best" target level. Other players were bemused because when they looked at the solution they couldn't see anywhere near enough words to explain the highest scores. The progress scale was static, and only went a small way past Best, so anyone who played a lot more words would see the pointer glide past the end of the scale and end up somewhere way to the right of the puzzle. So I put the "All words" checkbox on the solution display and introduced the Maven and Cham target levels, with the progress display being re-scaled when you reach "Best" and "Maven".
The name came to me when I noticed that a certain set of letters could make only one word from the standard word list. Actually, I think there were a few words like that, but "chihuahua" was the only cute one.
There have been several changes since the game first went live in September 2005, and there are more to come. But I think it's the players who make Chihuahua what it is. As mymermaid says, it's fun to see familiar names every day and compete against people we feel we know a little bit.
Thanks for your encouragement and support, and keep the ideas rolling in.
