What unites cubers with the kendama community, sport stackers (competitive cup stacking), and the most passionate philatelists (stamp collectors)?

Kendama (left), sports stacking (bottom right), and philately (top right).

Others doubting the practicality of our hobbies. Isn’t that fun!

This is a serious issue for many cubers. The community is young; a large portion of the community is around 10-15 years old. And behind many young cubers is a skeptical parent limiting the time their child spends on a “useless toy.”

       Average age in the r/Cubers subreddit

Why isn’t cubing recognized as a productive activity full of opportunity by the average parent?

Before we get to that let’s settle the “cubing isn’t useful” argument…

Let’s start by looking at other hobbies/extracurriculars commonly deemed more productive than cubing:

1. Sports: Many parents would love their kids to get involved in organized sports. Sports teach sportsmanship and it involves physical exertion not to mention the boat-loads of money associated with scholarships and going pro.
2. Academic endeavors: If your kid isn’t physically gifted, chances are that they’re mentally gifted. Academic team, hack-a-thons, school organized debates, technology competitions, and math competitions all can help build a resume and hone academic skills for future educational success.
3. Volunteering/leadership: Developing leadership skills through starting a club, project, or volunteer project is also a great way to develop skills that are valued later on in life.

So it seems that we value leadership, friendship, sportsmanship, the pursuit of knowledge, competition, physical exertion, money, and resume building.

Surely cubing has none of these right?

Stick around in the community for long enough and you will find yourself becoming a leader. I have been in the community for 6 years, and I have built a following from my YouTube channel.

On top of that, after a while you begin to make connections with prominent figures, and pretty soon you’re staffing competitions, starting clubs (Penn State Cubing coming soon!), and organizing competitions (coming soon too!).

With how interconnected the community is with its organizational body the WCA (World Cube Association), it’s only a matter of time before a novice cuber gains some leadership experience.

Another benefit of that community connectivity is in developing friendships. Making friends at a competition is perhaps the easiest thing to do at a competition. Most cubers are very open-minded, and small talk is very easy to initiate when you already have so much in common. Some of my closest friends are from cubing, not to mention the countless acquiescence I’ve made from all over the country at national competitions.

                                The very social atmosphere of an average cubing competition

Cubing is a sport (well at least I consider it one, but that’s a debate for another time). But what’s undeniable is that cubing competitions are inherently competitive in the right ways. Cubing teaches its young community the value of hard work to improve through personal competition rather than aggressive external competition like some sports.  Because the goal is to beat your own times in the beginning, by the time an individual gets world class and skilled enough to externally compete, they’ve developed the sportsmanship to compete healthfully. The best cubers then demonstrate this sportsmanship to the younger generation of future stars, starting the cycle all over again.

My good friend Daniel Karnaukh sets the world record single for Square-1 and is congratulated by my other good friend Daniel Goodman with the most wholesome hug of all time.

Well, one thing I can give sports is physical exertion. Though cubing doesn’t have much movement, it will certainly help with finger dexterity, and at a high level I have even seen cubers weight train. Besides wicked hand muscles this is the one thing cubing truly lacks.

In a similar sense cubing also isn’t inherently academic, but it opens countless doors to learn about puzzle theory. Though abstract, I cannot stress enough the benefits of sharpening spatial reasoning skills. We often say “spatial reasoning” because we really don’t know what to call it. Understanding how a puzzle works and then applying that knowledge to other puzzles doesn’t really have a name, it’s almost an intangible that applies to real life in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Just one example of how cubing links to academics is through the math concept of permutations. I wrote a paper in high school about deriving an equation for calculating a puzzle’s number of combinations. The academics are there if you look for them!

       Derivation of the Formula for the Possible Permutations of Even Layered                     3x3xn Cuboid Twisty Puzzles

I bet you think that money also belongs in the “ehhh not really” category with physical exertion and academics, but pro cubers are becoming more and more common. Content creators like me receive sponsorships from companies like thecubicle.us as well as Google adsense money from YouTube. Cubers can make money by selling cubes, performing professionally, or, my personal dream, being so good that they’re paid to use a certain company’s puzzle and travel to competitions all around the world. The fact of the matter is you’re just as likely to go pro in cubing as in basketball, maybe even more likely, so you won’t see many cubers in the unemployment line (especially because many of them can’t work yet!)

    The Ninja Star Cube, one of many “sticker                     mods” that I make and sell

And as for resume building I’d say a good 50% of my resume is cubing related, all of my college application essays were about cubing, and I’m doing just fine.

So I think I’ve proven in a rather long-winded manner that cubing is just as productive and practical as many other hobbies or extracurriculars. So that leaves us with the the original question posed: why is not viewed as such?

It’s quite simple: we dismiss what we don’t understand.

Whaddya know, this topic also relates back to the failure of cubing to have a communicator! When cubing doesn’t effectively communicate what it is to the general public, the public doesn’t understand it and dismisses it.

So whether it’s cubing or stamp collecting, make sure to keep an open mind before making a snap judgment.