The Friday Game: KernType

In the current climate, anything can be a game, and the weirder it is, and the more niche the subject matter seems, the better the results. Take KernType, which I read about over on Jay Is Games this week. Here’s a game about laying out text. Is that meant to be fun? Amazingly, it is. It’s actually a lot of fun.

KernType was created by interaction designer Mark McKay for the interactive learning group Method of Action as a means of picking up the ins and outs of typography, and the appeal of the game lies with the fact that, while it’s not exactly educational software in the traditional sense, you still feel like you’re exploring a new skill. Better yet, actually, you feel like you’re exploring a skill you already possess but have simply never thought about before. Kerning is the process of spacing out text to make it aesthetically pleasing, and while I’m guessing there’s a mathematical element to the real thing, it’s also something of a dark art – as is always the case whenever beauty is involved.

And it is beautiful: getting the right distance between a T and an E for example, can light up your day to a, frankly, rather worrying extent. Infographics and text have been heavily in vogue for quite a while now, so it’s nice to be able to explore why these things are so nice to look at in the first place – and why it’s so painful when they’re even the littlest bit out of whack.

KernType’s basic concept is that you move the letters of a given word around until you’re happy with the spacing of them, and then your solutions are scored against the work of a professional. While you’re likely to have one or two weak spots – Garamond, as I always suggested, is my particular Kryptonite – one of the most fascinating aspects of the game is how innate a lot of these mysterious internal judgements turn out to be. I’ve forced various people to play KernType over the course of the last few days – I do mean force – and almost everybody scores 70 or above out of 100 overall. We’re all typographers, just like we’re all detectives, and we’re all sociologists.

The other fascinating aspect is how much you want to brag about it afterwards. Almost every review I’ve read of KernType has ended with the writer slipping their final result into the text (78 per cent, as you’re asking, which puts me below Jay Is Games). I suspect this goes some way beyond the normal high score mentality of gamers and speaks, a little, to contemporary fixations. In the modern world, we’re all specialists now, and it’s a pleasure to try out another occupation at its most nuanced, its most specific, and see how we measure up.