Woman's Hour - The women behind our best-loved puzzles and games - A Woman's Hour special

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

In a Boxing Day special, Anita Rani celebrates a favourite Christmas activity: puzzles and games.Anita hears from Leslie Scott, the woman who invented Jenga, and steps into the world of crosswords and general knowledge quizzes with Kate Mepham, setter for the Daily Telegraph.She pays tribute to Agatha Christie, the woman behind the most famous puzzles ever written, with novelist and essayist John Lanchester, and host of the Shedunnit podcast, Caroline Crampton.Anne Corbett, professor in dementia research at the University of Exeter, explains the role games can play in the battle to keep our minds fit and healthy.And Anita dives into gaming with Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, one of the bestselling novels of recent years: a love story set in the world of video games. Eimear Noone, the composer behind World of Warcraft and the first woman to conduct at the Oscars, explains how video game soundtracks come together, while Frankie Ward, Esports host and journalist, has tips on the best games to play while breastfeeding.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Hannah Sander

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Just to say that for rights reasons, the music in the original radio broadcast has been removed for this podcast. Hello and welcome to Woman's Hour and a very happy boxing day. Now we have officially entered the twilight zone between Christmas and New Year where time becomes meaningless and we can sit around all day playing board games, piecing together a jigsaw, playing a computer game, maybe doing a crossword in front of the telly or the radio. And on the programme today we are going to be celebrating all things games. We will hear from the woman who invented Jenga

and we'll step into the world of crosswords and general knowledge quizzes. We will pay tribute to Agatha Christie, the woman behind the most famous puzzles ever written. And we will find out what role games can play in the battle to keep our minds fit and healthy. As well as all of that, we will celebrate gaming with the writer behind one of the world's bestselling novels of recent years, a love story set in the world of that, we will celebrate gaming with the writer behind one of the world's best-selling novels of recent years, a love story set in the world of gaming, and the composer Ima Noon, who is joining us on the programme in a little moment. And we couldn't have a whole programme dedicated to puzzles without setting some for you at home. So stay tuned for those.

We're not live today, but if you want to get in touch, you can do so in the usual way. Email us through our website. But let's start with the women who have created some of our most loved puzzles. Leslie Scott is the brains and business acumen behind Jenga, a game that I'm sure most of you know very well. The game is to build a tower from wooden blocks and take it in turns to slide a block out of the tower and balance it on top. The first to collapse

the tower is the loser. Leslie, welcome to the programme. Thank you. Also in the studio, I have Kate Meffam, who sets the general knowledge crossword for the Daily Telegraph and runs the company who produce puzzles for that newspaper and many others. So, Kate, thank you for joining us. I'm going to come to you first, Leslie. Jenga, one of the best-selling games in the world. Loads of us have it at us. I'm going to come to you first, Leslie. Jenga, one of the best-selling games in the world. Loads of us have it at home. I particularly like the giant one.

How did you come to invent it? I thought you might ask that question, and it's an extremely difficult question to answer. It's sort of evolved as a game within my family for quite a long time, before I actually thought this was something that didn't exist as a game on the market. When did you first start playing this game? Because it was a game that you had

in the family. It was a game, there was a set of blocks that were actually offcuts from a sawmill. I had a much younger brother. And when I say it evolved in the family, I mean, literally, we were just playing this game. And I mean, as you would play with children's building blocks. I came to live in England. I grew up in Africa and I came to live in England. And I had some of these box of blocks with me at the time. I mean, it's a sort of funny way of putting it, but I actually decided I wanted to start a company and then decide what I was going to do with that company.

So it wasn't't I didn't actually set out initially to sort of be a games designer but I became a games designer having come up with Jenga. Well when did you just realize that you had a game that you wanted to turn into something that you wanted to sell? It was in 1982 I had played my block game with enough people for them to go, this is a really good game, to think, well, I'll turn this into a product. And then there was a long process in actually turning what had been a handmade set into a mass-produced game. Because I think not a lot of people know that actually those blocks in a Jenga set are all slightly different from each other or randomly, but very, very slightly different.

So how do you do that? How do you go about taking it to market? Well, I knew absolutely nothing about the market. I found a workshop up in Yorkshire, in fact, that would make it for me and I gave the game a name I gave it the name Jenga which um I gave it that name basically because I'm the I'm I grew up speaking Swahili and it's a it's a the origin of the word is Swahili what does it mean it means well Kajenga means to build Jenga is an imperative it's build so you had the name I had you had the game you've got your prototypes you've had these blocks built what what happens next i then took it to the toy market a toy show and in london in 1983 and launched it and i'd by that time by that stage i'd persuaded

a bank to lend me money telling them it was going to make me millions and i mean how much was it for oh that's a very good question. I don't remember. I mean, at the time, it seemed astronomical. It was like sort of 40 or 50,000 pounds. I mean, it's still astronomical. Given how much is involved in actually putting a game on the market, it's nothing. But at the time, it was a lot.

And then I ended up borrowing lots of money from other sources. My mother underwrote a loan. That's belief in your daughter, isn't it? That really is. Well, I've told my own children, because both of them are in business, that never to come to me to ask anything. I'm not putting my house on the line for them.

So you take it to a game fair and... And I didn't sell a single one. It was at the toy fair in London. I took a stand there. I just thought, you know, I'd played the game with lots of people. Everybody said they loved it. I was unbelievably naive. I mean, the naivety came not only in the fact that, you know,

to put something out there that didn't exist before. So I was a one person, one product business. And I didn't really have an advertising budget. And I learned very fast that even the people that stopped by my stall and and enjoyed the game just said how are you actually going to show that this block of bricks is fun so what was the turning point when did it go from you know you pushing this game um with a lot of stress and a lot of debt to actually someone believing in you. There was several turning points.

I mean, I did actually get it to sell, but in hundreds, not thousands. So I started to design other games and started to publish other games myself. I took the game to the States and a Canadian toy company saw it. And then they wanted the rights to the game to the States and a Canadian toy company saw it. And then they wanted the rights to the game. They wanted the game, but they didn't want the name. They did not want the name. So I read this about you and I thought, wow, that says something about your personality, that you've got this massive games company in Canada who said, we'll buy it.

I think anybody else might have gone, all right, yeah, whatever, change the name, do whatever you want. What made you stick to your guns and convince them that Jenga was the name it should be I had had it fixed in my mind that one day you'd say that name and it would mean the game and I had called the game Jenga the perpetual challenge which is what I meant I meant it went on you know it was an endless challenge and they went oh you know Jenga is it doesn't mean anything it's not going to explain it it doesn't describe this game at not going to explain, it doesn't describe this game at all and perpetual nobody in North America is going to know what the word

perpetual means. So I said okay you can drop perpetual. Keep Jenga. It's absolutely brilliant and now as you know, you were quite right, we all know the word Jenga instantly and everybody knows what the game is. I'm going to bring in Kate because Kate, the Daily Telegraph,

publishes all sorts of puzzles from bridge questions through to crosswords. That's right. What's your role? It's a multifaceted role. It depends which sort of hat I'm wearing on which day, but I compile crosswords for the Telegraph, the giant general knowledge on a Saturday,

its sister crossword, which is linked up, the Hercules crossword on a Saturday. It's sister crossword, which is linked up the Hercules crossword on a Monday. And then producing a vast variety of puzzles, the Sudoku, the code words, quick crosswords, word searches, you name it, we produce them. How do you get into a job like that? It's an inherited business. I took the business on from my father, who was one of the Telegraph's illustrious crossword maestros.

Let's name him. Michael Metham. He introduced Sudoku to the Telegraph back in 2005. It's Boxing Day and we've sort of set out the programme by saying everyone's playing quizzes and puzzles at home and it's that time of year. What were Christmases like at your house though? Your dad was the crossword Sudoku puzzles guy.

Yeah, very, very gamey, puzzly as you'd imagine. Yeah, so I mean puzzles really are sort of in my DNA. It was just, you know, just sort of like having a cup of tea or a piece of bread and butter or something, you know, it wasn't anything out of the ordinary for the family to sort of be gaming and puzzling. And when you're setting them for the readers of The Telegraph, what do you have in mind? Are there some things that work better than others? Yeah, I mean, for the giant general knowledge crossword, I tend to stick to classical, traditional, arts, cuisine, etymology,

interesting facts about the past, that sort of thing, history. I tend to stay away from too much popular culture. The readership is quite traditional. And what was it like taking over your father's business? I was already working for my father to sort of take up some of the slack because he was getting more and more business coming through, doing more crossword compiling, more puzzle compiling. He was compiling masses of puzzle books and it was a bit of a sort of puzzle storm. So I was working with my father for only six months before he died. I was sort of stepped into his shoes within hours and I was absolutely

determined to sort of take the company forward. Why? Where did that determination come from? For many reasons, because I sort of knew how important it was to him. It was important to me. Yeah, obviously it seemed like a great career option for me. I knew it was going to be incredibly difficult because obviously my father had been doing it for sort of decades and I was a bit of a newbie and everybody knew that the telegraph but they did actually really look after me yeah it was it was many reasons why I why I wanted to do it yeah I'm very glad that I did yeah and um we would quite like if

you if you could care I think we should have a bit of a quiz for our listeners today is boxing day we're talking about puzzles and quizzes should we should have a bit of a quiz for our listeners today. It is Boxing Day. We're talking about puzzles and quizzes. Shall we set the listeners a couple of questions? I know you've brought a couple in. See whether any of our listeners know the answer. This is just for fun. It's a pre-recorded programme. But let's see if you can answer them amongst yourselves at home today on Boxing Day. So, Kate, what have you got for us?

Yes, so they're sort of ornithologically themed. So what is the UK's official favourite songbird? Known collectively as a chime or a herd, which songbird is traditionally associated with Boxing Day or St Stephen's Day? And Henry VIII is the first known English monarch to have eaten which game bird at Christmas? Thank you, Kate.

Write your answers down. Discuss them amongst your friends and family. Do not Google. It's too easy. And we will give you the answers before the end of the programme. Leslie and Kate, thank you for now. Let's turn our attention now to the woman behind some of the most famous puzzles in the world, Agatha Christie. She was the author of many classic murder mysteries, Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express, The Body in the Library,

and then there were none, and other Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple stories. I'm sure some of you have been watching them over the Christmas period. I know I always do. We're joined now by two people who know her work very well. Caroline Crampton is an author and podcaster. She hosts She Done It, which is available on BBC Sounds that looks at the great era of female crime writers. Caroline joins us from Liverpool.

And John Lanchester, who is the author of five novels and three works of nonfiction and also a contributing editor to the London Review of Books. John and Caroline, welcome. Lovely to have you. Wasn't that fascinating

listening to the two of them talking about puzzles and second quizzes, John? Yeah, absolutely fascinating. Agatha Christie mysteries, where do they fit into your life? I suddenly realised I've read more of her books than I have books by anyone else when I was doing the maths.

I've read more than 50 books by her. And I don't quite know why. I think, I mean, I certainly read them at particular times, times when I need comfort, times when I need distraction. I'm finishing a book at the moment and somehow she's just perfect for that when you're doing something else quite demanding with your head and you want something that hits this sort of sweet spot of satisfying, distracting, but actually not asking too much of

you. You wrote a brilliant essay for the London Review of Books describing Christie as a writer who cared more about plotting out a puzzle than about other elements of writing. What did you mean by that? Well, there's a thing you notice when you read and reread her books is she was absolutely fascinated by formal puzzles. And it's this curious thing that when we think of form in literature, it's often difficult demanding writers like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce who you think of being particularly obsessed with just sort of setting formal difficulties and how the novel works and how stories work and how you tell stories.

But actually, I think Christie's unmatched in the range and variety of techniques she uses, because you have books where everybody did it. You have books where nobody did it. You have books where the detective did it. You have books where one was just the title came into her head. Why didn't they ask Evans? So she wrote a whole novel about that. She wrote, she was intrigued by the idea of N and M being so similar. So she wrote a novel called N or M, which turns on exactly which letter it is. She, you know, there's a thumping cliche in the 20s and 30s about mystery stories involving a body in the library so she wrote a book called a body in the library um she wrote

one where the murder the time and place and the murder is announced in advance and it's called a murder is announced it's just this she had this deep fascination with setting herself these challenges um uh i think you know just purely for the sake of the fascination of it. I mean, she really did truly love playing with the form. And you think that the detective Hercule Poirot is part of the reason her books feel like puzzles or games? Well, I do. I mean, there's this odd, there's this mystery about Poirot because, I mean, most detectives in most detective stories are a bit daft.

You know, there is something slightly ridiculous about all of them. Going right back to Sherlock Holmes with his cocaine addiction and his pipe and all that. But, you know, Poirot is so ridiculous. He looks like a boiled egg. He's constantly playing with his absurd moustache. And, you know, it's not like the fact that this moustache is ridiculous is a joke. I mean, the books keep saying he's got this ridiculous moustache and he's twizzling all the time. He's vain, he can be a bit pompous,

he's constantly talking about, you know, drinking hot chocolate, his favourite drink to help his little grey cells, you know. He solves murders by... He never does any work, he just sits there and thinks about them, which, you know, all of it is completely daft and he's also really annoying. And yet he's the most popular detective of all time there's something baffling about that and I think it's partly because

he's just a device you don't get emotionally invested in Poirot you don't feel connected to him he's just a way of solving the mystery so I think in a strange way he's sort of transparent he's just a function of solving the mystery. So I think in a strange way, he's sort of transparent. He's just a function of solving the mystery. And I think, you know, that must be the reason he's so popular, because in a

sense, there's nothing else to like. Even Christie thought he was quite annoying. Her advice to anyone who wanted to write detective stories was, you know, don't have a completely ridiculous detective because you'll spend a lot of time with him and she said himself you know I rather doubt that anyone would consult Monsieur Poirot. Caroline I'm going to bring you in here because you know all about this world with your podcast She Done It. Remind us who Agatha Christie was and how she came to write Murder Mysteries in the first place. So in lots of ways Agatha Christie was a fairly ordinary product of her time. She was born in 1890 into a fairly well-to-do family living in Torquay and Devon that had American origins. And she was brought up primarily to get married. So she didn't really go to school for any great length of time. She wasn't expected to be educated, no expectation she would go to university. She was quite good at music. So she got a year in Paris to work on her music. And she was apparently a very good singer in pianist, but she was stricken with stage fright. So she quickly realised that any kind of performing career was not going to be for her.

And then the First World War struck, and she got engaged quite quickly to Archie Christie, where the famous last name came from, and then married to him. But her life was in this hiatus because Archie was away fighting in France. Although they were married, they had no home together. She still lived with her mother. And she was volunteering at a hospital working in a dispensary, learning all about poisons and chemicals and drugs and so on. And she was also a big fan of reading murder mysteries. And one day her sister challenged her saying, I bet you couldn't write one like this. And something

in Agatha's brain went, I bet I could. And so she tried. She even went away on a little solo holiday in 1916 to finish her book because she was so absorbed by the writing of it. And that book became The Mysterious Affair at Stiles, published in 1920. Interesting. And you said there that she was reading murder mysteries because, of course, she didn't invent them, did she? No, not at all. She was a big fan of Sherlock Holmes and the Arsene Lupin stories, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown. She was a great reader of the sort of late Victorian Edwardian detective fiction. A lot of it serialised in magazines as well as published in book form. And she was part of the 1920s puzzle craze. What was that?

This was a broader societal trend really which is theorised to have been a response to the trauma of the First World War that popular culture took this turn post-1918 into exactly the kind of things John was just talking about with Agatha Christie. You know, the comforting, the absorbing, but not too absorbing, pastimes that were safe and enjoyable, often enjoyable, together as well, people wanting to spend time together. So this is things like crosswords first becoming really popular, then all kinds of parlor games, treasure hunts, and murder mysteries, where you get a puzzle for the detective to solve, and as the reader, you get to solve it alongside them.

And a particular kind of murder mystery was very popular as well, grew out in this time, slightly different from what you've had in Sherlock Holmes, where there is a game for the reader to take part in, this notion of a fair play detective novel, where the writer must leave their clues out in the open so that theoretically the reader has everything they need to solve the mystery before the detective does. And that's what Agatha Christie does, John. She does.

And I think Caroline's thing, fascinatingly, answers one of the questions you have reading Christie, because the books often have these diagrams in. They have these frequently, to be honest,

amazingly bad diagrams of rooms off a corridor. I've just been reading One Murder in Mesopotamia. And again, there's a courtyard of this. And you say, why am I reading it? Why am I looking at a badly drawn diagram of a courtyard in Iraq in 1930 you know and and that obviously comes out of this thing of that the reader was supposed to treat it as a puzzle that they could try and solve themselves and the idea that you could frown over the diagram

and frown over the clues in the book and figure it out for yourself. You must think about fair play when you're setting your quizzes, Kate. I mean, the craft of a crossword compiler is really making sure that they're fitting words in the grid that are solvable and not just putting words in for the sake of fitting words in. Fair play, Leslie. How does that come into when you're designing games? It's a critical point. I mean, I'm very, very interested in Agatha Christie from that point of view,

because it's that idea that if you, there is nothing more annoying in a game if you're sort of in the middle of it all and it is actually not fair, as in the rules are such that there's no way that you can actually balance out i mean i would say something like monopoly is an incredibly unfair game explain go well because it looks frustrating for sure well it's it's unfair in the sense that at the very big um it's very early on there is no chance that you're going to catch up with

somebody that's that i don't know he's got all the hotels already or whatever yeah it's very early on there is no chance that you're going to catch up with somebody that's that i don't know who's got all the hotels already or whatever yeah it's amazingly boring and annoying game but it was designed to be wasn't it because it was anti i think they were quakers who invented it and it was it was meant to be i mean the clue is in the name it was an anti-capitalist game warning about the dangers of monopoly well it was actually the original game was by a woman called elizabeth mcgee and it was actually called the landlord's game that, the original game was by a woman called Elizabeth McGee. And it was actually called The Landlord's Game. That was the original game. And it was actually about the evils of Monopoly, in a sense. And it survives in how, I mean, it's quite an oppressive game to play.

Because you can tell after 10 minutes who's going to win. And then, you know, 90 minutes later, still grinding it out. Yeah. And I think there's also, there's that balance. I mean, people will play games for different reasons. And sometimes chance, they play because for different reasons and sometimes chance they play because they actually want to play chance. They want to push their luck kind of games.

But a game that is entirely about chance, entirely about the roll of the dice, I think can be thought of as an unfair game in that sense is that, you know, somebody will suddenly win a game that has not worked towards i mean there's a sense of unfairness about that when it's just about chance what is it um leslie about games that we particularly enjoy what is it about the sort of the what the setup that

engages us you are stepping into what we actually call as games designers a magic circle. I mean, it's literally called that sort of sense that you step out of the real world, you step into this circle that's been created that's bound by rules. It has a beginning and an end. There's a sort of sense of freedom within a controlled environment.

Caroline, I'd like to bring you back in and a bit more about Agatha Christie because after the First World War, people wanted a game that would stop them thinking about grief and pain. And Christie's books were often described as cozy crime. What does that term mean to you? So cozy crime is actually a that term mean to you? So cozy crime is actually a term that's more common in America than it is here. In America, it's a proper publishing category. They have a whole genre. You'll get a section in a bookshop called cozy crime. I think we're starting to use it here more, but I think here it has a slightly

more nebulous meaning, indicating that a book will not be too violent. There won't be any sort of lurid descriptions of violence or gore or anything like that. And that, in fact, the dead body may well be tidied away very quickly, even within the first chapter. And then we can get on to the business of detection unencumbered by the idea of tragedy or loss. I think that's often what we mean by cosy crime. It is a bit of a tautology, isn't it? Is crime ever cosy? Absolutely.

And yet we love to read about it. Well, I don't know, John, you tell me a bit more, because I think maybe when we watch the TV adaptations, they can feel a bit cosier than the books. Because actually, it was quite dark what she was writing about. Very dark. She was. I mean, I think she absolutely believed one of the reasons her books...

I mean, it's a funny thing that there's this mixture of fantasy with something like Poirot, and yet there is a kind of emotional truth in them. And I think it's partly that she... I don't know if she believed in evil in a metaphysical sense, but she certainly believed

that people were capable of doing incredibly bad things. People could hate each other and wish each other ill and kill each other ill and kill each other and knowingly do really wicked things and Christie had no

difficulty with that. She accepted that as a fact about people and it comes through in her books. There is sometimes a really quite oppressive emotional atmosphere in them when the sense of foreboding and violence and murder

and then there were none is one that is genuinely, it's a genuinely dark and troubling story and there's another one where the murder is another one of her formal games, it's a murder that had been solved and indeed the perpetrator had been hung

and then someone turns up with evidence that proves that the person couldn't have done it. So it starts with the murder being unsolved, and you realise one of the people in this closed setting, that's another Christie thing, a closed setting, must have done it, and that's called Ordeal by Innocence. And again, that's a really quite psychologically oppressive book. So she did have this grounding in the fact of, you know,

human ill will and capability of doing very bad things. And the other thing that sort of decosifies them, that it's easy for a modern reader to forget, is that the people who are caught doing the murders get the death penalty. You know, Poirot and, you know, cuddly old Miss Marple, they're sending people to be hung. And she only very occasionally mentions it. It's interesting because Dorothy Sayers, one of her great contemporaries, her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, in one of the books has a huge crisis of conscience about, you know, about what the terrible thing he'd done, sending someone off to the hangman's noose, which prompted P.D. James to say, well, you know, if he didn't like it,

he could give up detecting as a hobby and take up collecting books instead. It's not the job for you, yeah. Antiquarian literature is a good subject as well. And Christie had no problem with that at all. You know, there were bad people in there being sent to the death chamber. But it does, as I say, it's easy to forget that now.

And there is this sort of dark underpinning, you know, the back of the mirror is dark to make the reflection light in her work, I think, because of that. Fascinating conversation. John, thank you very much. And Caroline, thank you as well for joining us to talk about Agatha Christie. You are listening to Women's Hour on BBC Radio 4 with me, Anita Rani, and a studio full of guests. And this is Boxing Day, and we're celebrating games and puzzles. But I want to think now a bit more about what's going on in the brain when we do puzzles. Anne Corbett is Professor of Dementia Research at the University of Exeter, and has studied the role that games might play

in slowing cognitive decline. What happens to our brains when we do a puzzle? The brain is like any other muscle in the body. It likes to be trained and it likes to be challenged. So if we challenge it with a problem, then we see those pathways in the brain start to activate. They get challenged, they become more active, they start making new connections in the brain and they solve those problems by finding previous memories or previous problems that solved before, making those connections and using those to solve that problem. What's interesting is if we do that regularly, we actually strengthen those connections and we get better at those puzzles. And does that continue to happen? Because normally when people get to a certain age, they go, oh no, I've lost a few brain cells, you know, it's not quite what it used to be. Can the brain continue to develop?

Absolutely. It does get harder. You're absolutely right. Sadly, once we're out of our 20s and 30s, those connections aren't quite as quick to fire, they're not quite as quick to make. However, it is so important, therefore, to actually continue to challenge our brains, to continue to train them in the same way that it's important to do physical exercise. OK, so what's the neuroscience behind that? The neuroscience behind that is simply that our brain is made up of cells that form connections with each other. The more we use them, the more efficient they become. They use something called neurotransmitters to communicate with each other, and cells become more and more complex the more they're used. And the more connections there are, the better protected they are from damage.

And doing puzzles, doing crosswords, can that help? We see, even in research that we've done, people who report doing crosswords, doing Sudoku regularly, do seem to have better brain function as they age than people who don't. And I think the real message here is that if you enjoy it, and if it challenges you, then it is doing you some good. What we do see, however, if you want to do better than that, if you want more than that, then there are certain programs that are actually designed to specifically challenge parts of the brain that we know are really effective in this area, particularly problem solving.

So you're the academic lead for a huge study into brain training and brain health, and the study is called PROTECT. So tell us about that. What is PROTECT? PROTECT is our flagship study here at the University of Exeter in cognitive health. We want to know what happens to the brain as it ages. So Protect is a cohort that anyone over 40 can join and you do cognitive brain function tests every year on your computer and we develop then a map to see how people are changing over time, how different factors affect those changes and what we can do to intervene. And part of that is running clinical trials of brain training programmes and what we've do to intervene. And part of that is running clinical trials of brain training programmes.

And what we've found through some of the trials on Protect is that actually doing regular brain training, just 10 minutes a day, actually improves your brain function over time. What kind of brain training? What should we all be doing? Yeah, so there are actually six games in our programme of problem solving. And we test all aspects of how the brain works. And that includes their memory, their reaction time, how they process, and also something called executive function, which is our problem solving ability.

Tell me a bit more about your research. Like, what are you looking at? Are you looking at signs for people who might be more susceptible or more likely to get it? Like, what exactly are you studying we're particularly interested in what the really early signs are that someone might be not aging in the normal way in terms of their brain function we all slow down as we get older that's inevitable but we want to know what the early signs are that might indicate dementia later on because that's the most important time when we can intervene and do something about it and we want to use the technologies that we have in our research to

monitor people better monitor people at home so that we know when to send them into to see their GP or to see a memory clinic so that if there's a problem we can make sure they're assessed and they're supported and they're treated in the right way at the right time. And you can do those tests at the GP can't you as well but how is what you're doing differing to those tests? They're much more able to detect change in our reaction time for example which you can never measure easily in a clinic. Some people might have done a pen and paper test called a mini mental state exam when you have to draw a clock or remember a few words. But these are so individual and people can easily learn and get better at them. The tests on a computer, you can't learn or get better at them.

They're different every time. They detect much more subtle changes in the way that our brain is responding to what they see on the screen. And also what's nice is a computer doesn't judge. So people are far less anxious doing these tests than they are maybe sitting in a GP surgery, which can be a difficult time. Is there any evidence to suggest that doing puzzles or crosswords can prevent or cure dementia or Alzheimer's? I think the important thing is language here. So what we've shown is that it appears that if you engage with brain training and doing puzzles, you can reduce your risk. Now, it's not a silver bullet. Dementia and cognitive health is really complex. And it's all about more than one thing that we do to reduce

our risk. But the research does show that if you engage with these sorts of activities, you keep your brain active and challenged then it can reduce your risk of dementia. Do we know why this disease affects women more than men? We don't there are so many factors at play here we know there's a lot of interesting research at the moment around menopause and how that affects cognition as we age and of course those two things do tend to happen around the same time there are a lot of lifestyle factors and genetics involved. So these things, it's a very complicated landscape. Well, you've touched on a word that we've discussed a lot on women's menopause there. What about women going through menopause? Because they do suffer from,

well, brain fog is one of the symptoms. It is, and it's not well understood. You won't be surprised to hear there's not been as much research into this as there should have been. We're starting to see improvements here, but you're absolutely right. It's a well-established phenomenon. We just don't understand why that is yet. And we've been talking about puzzles and quizzes and challenging our minds and sort of thinking differently in the programme today. But what about learning a new skill, learning an instrument, learning a language? Are these good ideas as well? Because not everybody wants to sit down and do a crossword puzzle. Absolutely.

And it's so important to do what you enjoy as part of this. And yes, we do see that anything that challenges the brain. So we have some research showing that if you learn a new musical instrument or you engage with music as you get older, that's very important. Learning a new language is a really good example. All of these things are building resilience, building new connections in your brain that can then help reduce your risk of damage later on. That was Professor Anne Corbett.

And if you want to take part in the Protect Study, there's more information available at protectstudy.org.uk. I'm going to bring Caroline in on this. Caroline, as well as you love to solve a murder mystery, but what else do you do to keep your brain functioning? Do you do other kinds of puzzles alongside that? I'm a big fan of Sudoku. I love those Sudoku books that you can buy at the airport. I will happily work my way through one of those. I'm not very good at them. It takes me a really long time to do anything but the easiest possible ones. But I do really enjoy that kind of absorption in something

that doesn't have any relation to anything else I've got going on. And I do find it quite calming, almost meditative sometimes. Caroline, Agatha Christie, did she like to solve a puzzle or two as well? Would she have been sat with a crossword? I don't know that she was specifically a fan of crosswords but one thing she was definitely a fan of were these newspaper mystery competitions where newspapers would serialize a mystery story and then at a certain point they would pause it and ask readers to write in with the solution. She took part in several of those and one under her own name and then later on she stopped doing it under her own name because I guess it was a bit too well known.

And she did it under a different name. And she did quite well. At least once she didn't win, but she placed. She got a kind of commendation, which I think is quite funny. If they'd known that they were giving the Queen of Crime a second place. But yes, those are really popular in the 1920s. You should bring those back John. No it's a really good idea

I think Graham Greene once came second in a competition to write a typically Graham Greene sentence a big fan of things like that. Actually I'm going to make a recommendation because it is you know Boxing Day and there is Binge Worthy TV and this is on iPlayer

and it's Ludwig. I don't know if any of you have seen it. It's very, isn't it brilliant? Cozy Crime. It's David Mitchell. It's Anna Maxwell Martin. And he is, he's a puzzle setter. He sets the crosswords and he gets roped into a scenario where he's now having to solve crime, solve murders.

And because of the way he sees puzzles and he sees pattern, he's able to solve murders very, very quickly. I'm not going to give it away, but it's it's a brilliant. It's basically bringing together everything we're talking about. Have you seen it, John? No, actually, funny enough, we were saving it up to watch over Christmas. Perfect. This evening you can start it. Officially can start tonight. That's brilliant. I am delighted now to have three women who are dominating the world of gaming, an industry that is bigger than Hollywood.

Yes, it is. Gabriel Zevin is the author of the bestselling novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. The book follows the relationship of Sadie and Sam, two childhood friends who bond over a love of gaming and go on to build a video game company together. Radio 4 listeners may well have heard it on Radio 4's book at bedtime earlier this year. Or of course, remember Gabriel being on Woman's Hour talking to me when the book came out. She joins us now from LA. It's wonderful to have you back on the programme, Gabriel.

Imanoon is an award-winning composer and wrote music for World of Warcraft. That is one of the most popular multiplayer games of all time. At one point, it had over 100 million registered users. Ema is also a conductor and was the first woman

to conduct at the Oscars. Ema, delighted to have you with us. And Frankie Ward is an esports journalist and host of the BAFTA Games Awards. Thank you all for joining the Boxing Day Gaming Woman's Hour Party. Gabriel, I'm going to come to you first over in LA, if I may.

I've given a very brief summary, but tell us the story a bit more in depth, if you can, of Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Well, it's about these two people who, the way they can connect most is through video games. They are the most intelligent people in the room, but that doesn't always make you the most intelligent person in life. And so I think there are ways in which they use games to say things that they couldn't say to each other just in real life. And I have to say, I've been synopsizing this book for going on two years,

and I haven't gotten all that much better at it, to tell you the truth. I think the short answer is that it's about like love, art, video games and time, something like that. Where did your love of games begin? I had technology in my life and I didn't really see art and life and technology as essentially separate. I think I knew because my dad was a programmer that really what programming is, is learning a language. And it's a way for people to try to communicate with each other, not on like writing a letter or speaking French or whatever it is. And so really, I think that's in a way where gaming started for me. The first games I ever played were games that came preloaded on a computer my dad brought home from work, you know, and I still think about some of those games, even today.

Go on, name some. Which games? Well, there was a game called Alley Cat that I think about pretty much every time I pass by an apartment building. It's a game about an alley cat who lives in an alley. He jumps on garbage cans to access this apartment building, and behind each apartment window is a different minigame. And I remember playing this game and thinking that, you know, really behind every window, anywhere you walk in the world, is an entire world an entire life and so I think about the kind of lesson of this game all the time really when I'm walking in a city.

Frankie I'm going to bring you in because you were nodding to that Frankie esports journalist and host do you do you know Alley Cat? I don't unfortunately but it's more that I have the same memories of playing my first video games on a laptop my dad brought back from work. Go on, what were they? So Monkey Island 2 was a really early game that got me loving video games so much so that my dad mentioned it at my wedding. Also a game called Hugo Who Done It, which is another point-and-click game where one of the solutions was when you're trying to get to the garden and the gardener's blocking your way and asking for a kiss, you find garlic in the kitchen, you eat it,

and that puts the gardener off, sends him running away, and then you get to the garden, the garden is blocking your way and asking for a kiss, you find garlic in the kitchen, you eat it. And that puts the gardener off sends him running away, then you get to the garden. And I still remember that solution. And I played it when I was about five. Gabriel, why did you want to focus on the games developers and especially a young woman coding her own games? Why did you want to take us into that world? Well, the first generation of people to play video games as children were born in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And that's the same age I was born, the same era in which I was born. And so I realized as I started to research the subject of video games that the entire history of video games were contained within my lifetime. And so in a sense, what I would have if I wrote this book would be two coming of age stories. We'd have the coming of age of an artist story, what the Germans call a Kunstler Roman.

And then you'd also have the coming of age of an industry, which was the video game industry. But also the issues of sexism. Some people will ask me a question, which is why are video games so sexist? And I'm like, are they? Because they really they are, but only in the same way that the world at large is sexist. You know, so in a sense, as a reflection for everything that was happening. But, you know, I thought it was fascinating to be able to look at the issues of collaboration, the way gender plays out and who gets to promote things and who is the face of a certain thing. You know, so these were all subjects that were easily brought to the front through video games.

And who gets to be involved in the music of video games, Ema? You're known for your scores for games such as World of Warcraft. So how did you come to compose music for games? You know, there's, I think there's a strange pie chart out there somewhere that shows the crossover between uber music nerds and gaming nerds. And in the middle, you have the video game music community. My background is completely classical music with a smattering of traditional Irish music. So when you look at like the likes of Beethoven's manuscripts, you see him, you know, the diminution of an idea. So he'll start with a big, you know, florid, elaborate idea, and he will make it smaller and smaller and smaller down to the

absolute kernel, the truth of the idea, because he knows he wants to take that idea through different iterations and on a journey of development, developing the idea. But that's what happened, if you like, with some of these early game themes because they had to be programmed in note by note. Every single one of those notes would have been thought over and very, very important. And the simplicity in those themes made them iconic and memorable

and, you know, endlessly workable. We still do new arrangements of these themes from Zelda and from, you know, Mario and super fun. Yeah, as well as composing, you conduct some of the world's top orchestras performing these soundtracks from games. What kind of audiences do you draw? Ah, the best kind. I've sort of identified over the years

four or five different types of people. And I definitely program for the uber video game music fan. So there's always indie games in there there's always some some really esoteric and i always reach out to the community to get suggestions what's everyone listening to and excited about i look at what's you know some of our award-winning scores of lately and yes i did come and present something for the bafta game awards during covid dressed up in a ball gown to sit on a Zoom with a glass of champagne to present the best score award. But it's also about families. And I've noticed some sneaky

sort of my age group who wouldn't necessarily identify as gamers themselves, general members of the public, but who were as, who have nostalgia towards the games they played growing up. I see those parents my age coming in under the guise of their parents who are the symphony ticket season holders. The grandparents want to bring the younger kids in to hear the orchestra. So they think this is sort of a gateway into the classical world, which of course it is. And then parents sort of get wind of it and go, hang on a second, you know, I think I need to go and chaperone.

And these are the dads that are crying when we're playing the theme from Kingdom Hearts. You know, I mean, it's really fun. This is a question for both Frankie and Gabrielle, but Gabrielle, I'll bring you in first. How aware are you of the score when you're playing a game? You know, I think some of those themes, they stay with you forever. You know, they are because they are simple and they are iterated so many times, as Emer just said.

You know, I will think of them all the time. But I have to say, I often play games on mute as well. I hope that isn't devastating. Oh, wow. That's focus. That's dedication. I mean, sometimes if I'm, say, playing something on, you know, an iPad, it's like, or something like that, you know, a casual game,

I, you know, won't hear what it sounds like, and I will consciously want to go later to hear what the environment was like. But, you know, I think what fascinates me about video games is that they are so multi-disciplinary you know that there are so many arts involved in the making of video game I'm often asked the question are video games art I'm like they're about you know 50 arts at once you know yeah and definitely pop art because uh we bring in so many like that so many different different disciplines together how do you even start for world of warcraft do you get sent the game first you see what you're um composing to or you just sent uh how does

the composition work um it depends on the team and it depends on the developer and when you're when you're brought on board. But for Warlords of Draenor, and by the way, I shout out to my colleagues because there was a team of composers on that. We needed to write so much music. But what was really fun was for that one, we tried something new. We got some 2D images of what the artists were working on for the game. And we were literally told to work on whichever area, whichever images spoke to us the loudest. And I saw these particular areas that had writing that looked like the old Celtic, the old Irish Oam writing. And that just spoke to me.

So it brought a little bit of the old Celts. Of course, I always think of the horde as being the fir bullock of our legends in Ireland. So that's what spoke to me. And Russell Brower, the audio director at the time said, just go and tell a story with the music. But like, I think it was Leslie said earlier about the magic circle when you're playing a game. Part of our job, if not the greatest part of our job when we're writing for film or for games in particular,

is bringing everybody into that magic circle through immersion and the creating a world that people can just leave their regular day behind and just enter this complete realm of fantasy. And Frankie, you often step into this realm of fantasy, don't you? And you think that different games suit different phases of a woman's life, don't you? Definitely. I never got to really play MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. That means massively multiplayer role-playing game because i didn't have a high-powered gaming pc when i was a teenager

when the game first came out and that's the original vanilla warcraft they call it um and so i didn't really get to experience that world unfortunately and then built a gaming pc in my late 20s so i was much more likely to play a single player game like a dungeon crawler for example and definitely got more into those as i've got older because i think i used to be intimidated by dying in video games and in dungeon crawlers you die a lot um and then you come back to life exactly isn't that the bit the best thing about this you just keep coming keep coming back you do uh there's games called roguelikes where the whole point is for you to die and then every time you die you come back normally with another tool in your arsenal and roguelikes can actually be dungeon crawlers where

you're you're basically got swarms of of critters that you're trying to hack and slash your way across or defeat in different imaginative ways or they can be card games um so it's just such an amazing genre because if you feel like oh i can't do this the game's actually going to keep throwing things at you to help you eventually do it and you've had you got married you've actually talked about your dad's talking about your love of gaming and your wedding but what about when you had children did that change your the way you game definitely I've just had a second baby about three months ago thank you very much and so when I was in labour I have a handheld gaming console. I've got basically run the gamut of PCs and gaming consoles and things, so I can play anything.

I'm very fortunate in that aspect, except for the luxury of time. But yeah, during my labour, I was playing a roguelike card game and got to round 20 of 24 and felt very successful. And then the contraction started to hurt, and I had to lean over a beanbag and put the game to one side. And then once the baby was born, pick it up on exactly yeah so well that the game I was playing came out on mobile which was amazing so when you're breastfeeding at 3am in the morning you can actually you know put that on your phone or to be honest I rediscovered Candy Crush and played

about a thousand levels in two weeks because she didn't sleep very much um you've really got me thinking about because you know especially when you say gabriel these games came about in the 70s and 80s and i am very much such a generation just for just to just to share commodore 64 is the one i had and it was decathlon daily thompson's decathlon which i absolutely loved and now the way we play games in my household very much is you know might do a jigsaw or a puzzle or play charades or Trivial Pursuit, but also games on the console that everyone, like a quiz game that everybody can partake in. So it's all become part and parcel of kind of how we play. We were talking earlier about neuroscience

and how puzzling can help with the mind, Frankie. What kind of games are there that might help kind of train our brains? One of my favourite games for really challenging my brain is a gaming series about something called the Golden Idol. So there's two, The Curse of the Golden Idol, The Rise of the Golden Idol. And you are looking at these murder scenarios, or sometimes there isn't a murder, but there's something that's going to lead to one, and you're trying to work out what happened. So you're clicking through the scene, picking up words, and then you fill in the blanks of a page that literally has so-and-so did blank, so-and-so did so-and-so

blank. So it's a really fascinating game that is rewarding in the way that you discover what's happening in the story, but it really, really does use your brain. And I spent hours on one scenario. You've brought that full circle because we were talking about Agatha Christie a little bit earlier. So Kate, you like the sound of that one? Yeah, absolutely, yeah, it's fantastic Gabrielle, what will you be doing this Christmas? What games will you be playing? Will you be playing computer games as a family or will you be jangling or crosswords? Well, I also love The Case of the Golden Idol

I think because it's a word game as much as it is like a retro kind of, you know, the graphics are quite retro as well. But, you know, it is a game that requires you to solve puzzles with words. And I was talking to the novelist Celeste Ng about this and how many novelists we knew that had played, say, early Sierra games. Sierra games were actually had a female company head, Roberta Williams, and, you know, that had started to play these games as kids and had used them as a way to sort of learn storytelling techniques. I will say that my parents took up gaming there in their 70s about now two years ago when my book came out because they had read my book and they wanted to participate. They had never game before.

So you asked me what I'll spend Christmas Day doing. And that's probably playing Mario Party Jamboree with my parents. They're very competitive and it's a way to bond with your old folks or your young people. I actually think it's funny. People think of gaming as so isolating, but it can be incredibly social if you allow it to be.

Well, that was a fascinating chat about gaming. Well, we're coming to the end of the program, but before we go, Kate, please can you put our listeners out of their misery because you set some quiz questions earlier, which I will now remind everybody of, and if you could give us the answers. The first question that you set was,

what's the UK's favourite bird? It's the robin redbreast. Of course it's the robin. Of course it's the robin, Christmas robin. Second question, known collectively as a chime or a herd, which songbird is traditionally associated with Boxing Day or St Stephen's Day? And the answer is?

A wren. It's the wren. So if you got that right, well done you. And the third question. Henry VIII is the first known English monarch to have eaten which game bird at Christmas? And it is? The turkey. Of course it is the turkey.

Well done to all of you who got those right, especially if you didn't cheat. Thank you so much, Kate. And they were set by Kate Meffam, crossword setter for the Daily Telegraph and director of Crosswords Limited, no less. Thank you so much for joining us. And thank you to all my other guests,

to Leslie Scottott the inventor of jenga and founder director of oxford games limited john lanchester novelist and essayist caroline crampton host of the she done it podcast which is available on bbc sounds professor ann corbett from the university of exeter gabrielle zevin author of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow thank you for joining us from la and congratulations on the success of the book. Well-deserved. Imanoum, games composer. Thank you for joining us from Galway

and Frankie Ward, esports journalist and host. That's it from Woman's Hour. Enjoy the rest of your boxing day. Play all the games, play all the puzzles. Have a wonderful time with your family and friends. But for now, happy Boxing Day and goodbye. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. How can a celebration of death reframe how we think about losing our loved ones?

What can bridges made from tree roots teach us about the future we build for our descendants? And how can a broken object help us with mindfulness when things fall apart? I'm Jack Boswell, and in Something to Declare from BBC Radio 4, I'm going to take you around the world to explore how ancient wisdom and practices from other cultures can help us understand and maybe even improve our lives. I'll be learning about the Mexican Day of the Dead, the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi,

South African Ubuntu philosophy, and many more. Don't miss Something to Declare from BBC Radio 4, available now on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.