Meet the Puzzle Makers of New York Times Games (original) (raw)

Gameplay|Meet the Puzzle Makers of New York Times Games

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/crosswords/puzzles-games-constructor-voshell.html

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Our Game Makers

Burgess Voshell makes puzzles for Vertex.

Credit...Illustration by Ben Kirchner

Published Jan. 5, 2021Updated Oct. 26, 2021

Where do you live?

Brooklyn, N.Y.

When was your first New York Times puzzle published?

My first Vertex puzzle was published on Feb. 18, 2020, and it was a diamond.

What is your first memory of solving a puzzle or playing a game? Who were you solving or playing with?

I thought way too long about this one, in part because my memory is terrible, but also because I couldn’t decide if figuring out that the crescent peg goes in the crescent hole counts as a puzzle when you’re 2 years old.

There’s a chance that this is not my earliest memory of playing a game, but I’m going to go for it: I think I was about 4, and my parents had taken me along with them to their friend’s house. They had a kid about my age, and this kid had a Nintendo Entertainment System. I sat on the floor in their living room, with my neck craned upward as I made Mario jump across the glowing CRT. It was incredible and was the first time I remember playing a video game.

How did you get into making games? When did you consider yourself a “professional” puzzle or game maker?

This summer I went through an old, neglected box that my mom kept. Inside was a board game I made when I was around 6 years old that I had totally forgotten about. I’m not sure how to describe that feeling. It was a look into the past, with the wisdom of being in the present and attributing new significance to certain things from ages ago. It’s a special and distinct kind of feeling. Looking back in that particular way, it’s tempting to think maybe that was the start. Maybe it was, and that desire was in a sort of stasis, because I had no conception that I’d be able to make games professionally.

A more deliberate start for me was in 2015. I was working as a designer in a small architecture firm in TriBeCa, but I started spending the nights and weekends working on a digital game as a way of teaching myself how to code. I loved it so much. I grappled significantly with the idea of leaving architecture to pursue a career in games. It was gut wrenching, but ultimately I decided that I needed to make that leap.

About a year later, one of my games was nominated for an award, and got written about in Kill Screen. This felt like an important moment to me. I don’t think you need external validation to be “professional,” but this did help me to feel like I was making games that could be valued by people who didn’t necessarily share from my own creative interests.

What is your favorite game or puzzle?

This is such a hard question! I’ll stick to puzzle games. If I have to pick one, Baba Is You is definitely up there with my favorites. It’s a type of puzzle game where you push blocks around a grid, which is kind of an established genre of puzzle games, but the incredible part about Baba Is You is that some of those blocks are words. Those words can form logical statements that then become the truth and rules for a level.

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