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Work · October 18, 2024

WH

What happens if you make a crossword out of Reddit r/gaming

As a fan of dense New York Times-style crosswords, I challenged myself to create topic-specific puzzles. It turns out that generating crosswords and efficiently placing words is a non-trivial computational problem. I started the project, "Joystick Jargon" combining traditional crossword elements with gaming-related vocabulary. Here's the technical process behind it: 1. Data Source: Used a 3.8 Million Rows Reddit dataset from Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/datasets/webis/tldr-17). 2. Data Filtering: Narrowed down to gaming-related subreddits (r/gaming,…

What happens if you make a crossword out of Reddit r/gaming launched on October 18, 2024 with 53 votes, #659 of 5,185 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.

Alternativestop 13% of October 2024

In plain words

Joystick Jargon is a crossword puzzle generator that creates gaming-themed puzzles using vocabulary extracted from Reddit's gaming communities. The tool processes Reddit data through machine learning techniques to identify relevant gaming keywords, then algorithmically generates traditional crossword grids populated with gaming terminology. It is designed for crossword enthusiasts who want puzzles focused on video game culture and gaming-related language rather than general topics.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

As a fan of dense New York Times-style crosswords, I challenged myself to create topic-specific puzzles. It turns out that generating crosswords and efficiently placing words is a non-trivial computational problem. I started the project, "Joystick Jargon" combining traditional crossword elements with gaming-related…

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