LinkedIn — the place where you go to update your resume, network with other professionals and search for jobs — is now another place to play games.
Taking a cue from the very successful online puzzle and game integration at The New York Times, LinkedIn News launched a trio of thinking-oriented games on Wednesday, several weeks after the plan was first revealed.
The Microsoft-owned social platform views the once-per-day game play as another way to help people connect — and get them to spend more time on the website.
“We want to give people a way to exercise their brains while taking a quick break, but also give people a reason to connect with others,” Daniel Roth, editor in chief and VP at LinkedIn wrote in a post. “We hope that these games spark banter, conversations, and even a healthy bit of competition among professionals around the world.”
Games have become a crucial tool for growth for The New York Times, which told Axios earlier this year that its games — such as Wordle — were played more than 8 billion times in 2023. The newspaper now offers a $6/month games-only subscription, and subscription revenue increased nearly 10% to $418.6 million in the third quarter of 2023, Axios reported.
I paused my own attempts at Wordle and Connections this morning to launch LinkedIn and see how quickly three new games might attract my daily interest. Here are my quick thoughts on each (with GIFs via LinkedIn):
Pinpoint
- This word-association game reminds me the most of NYT’s Connections, which, as a word guy, I love playing. Much like that game’s grouping of words with a common theme, the objective in Pinpoint is to guess a common category that five words belong to. The words are hidden, and revealed one at a time, so the goal is to guess the category before all five reveals are up. This was the easiest of the three, at least on day one. “You’re crushing it!” LinkedIn told me, as it provided a link to send my score to my connections and set a notification for tomorrow’s game.
Crossclimb
- Another word game, this was a fun exercise that’s billed as a mix of trivia and word knowledge. You use clues to fill out words in a ladder and then you rearrange those words so that each one differs from the one above it by just one letter. Getting them in the right order unlocks two final clues to win the game. I shuffled a few times here trying to get the order right as my eyes seemed to play tricks on me and make letters blur together. But after that initial play, I think this one will be easier to master.
Queens
- The goal here is to fill a grid with queens (little crown emojis) so that there is one queen in each row, column and region. None of the queens can touch each other and there’s only one correct way to fill out the grid. This one might end up being the biggest time suck. I’ll admit that I had to close Queens without winning because I was about 6 minutes in and struggling — and I needed to quit playing around and get some work done!
Lakshman Somasundaram, a director of product management at LinkedIn, wrote in a post Wednesday that beyond the joy of taking a break and playing the games each day, users will get more out of the exercise after they play.
LinkedIn will show your connections who played, school leaderboards intended to reignite college rivalries, company leaderboards, and a broader community conversation to get tips and tricks, chat with creators, meet new connections, and so on.
Here’s a new LinkedIn video/ad hyping what your workday might look like going forward:
