TechCrunch first revealed in March that LinkedIn was covertly exploring the possibility of introducing word and logic puzzle games to its platform, akin to Wordle. Three of those games are now being formally launched by the platform in an attempt to draw in more players and boost engagement.
Starting today, Queens, Crossclimb, and Pinpoint—which test your word association, logic, and trivia skills, respectively—will be accessible to players worldwide through LinkedIn News, the division that created the games, as well as a direct connection to them.
Each of these games can only be played once a day, just like Wordle. Currently, you can invite your first-degree connections to play games with you, and if you choose to, you can discuss your status with those connections, including whether or not you've played a game and how well you performed.
Things could alter over time, as those social levers and the quantity of games are still up for debate. For the time being, LinkedIn intends to keep creating the games on its own, separate from its owner, Microsoft, and its sizable gaming business.
According to LinkedIn, the games are a more relaxed approach to strengthen ties amongst current LinkedIn friends.
According to LinkedIn, the games are a more relaxed approach to strengthen ties amongst current LinkedIn friends.
Dan Roth, the vice president and chief editor of LinkedIn News, stated in an interview that "gaming provides a way to build these network ties." It is difficult for people to stay in touch with one another.
But that's not all there is to it. It's important that the LinkedIn News team designed and developed these. The word and logic game portfolios that newspapers like The New York Times have amassed over the years—first with crosswords and then, more recently, with a wider variety of puzzles—are a major source of inspiration for LinkedIn's games. While some of these were purchased (NYT purchased the viral success Wordle in 2022), the majority were created internally.
Furthermore, games have shown to be a kind of a secret weapon for increasing engagement, particularly in a time when news organizations are trying to figure out what their businesses' futures hold and TikTok and Instagram seem to be controlling the younger user base.
Newspapers and magazines publish puzzles that are read by millions of people, which increases their audience and might even persuade them to read other articles in the publications.
In a similar vein, LinkedIn, which boasts over a billion users, has been enhancing its news and content division in an effort to increase user engagement. Similar to newspapers, it has a sizable advertising revenue in addition to paywalls for those who desire to access it more deeply. Games entice users to stay engaged longer, which increases the size of its advertising audience and may result in higher user value.
A brief summary of the three games:
A brief summary of the three games:
In the Sudoku-inspired game Queens, your goal is to arrange crowns in a way that does not overlap other crowns within a set amount of time. The graphic shows that while you can share scores with specific people, your company's affiliation is displayed on a scoreboard.
In light of the limitations some firms place on using social media at work, I questioned whether this could become troublesome or distracting. The one game per day restriction and the brief length of the games, according to Laura Lorenzetti, executive editor of LinkedIn in North America, should help with those problems.
We don't want people wasting their time, so they are contained and always will be contained, she explained. "We aren't here for that,"
It is said that Crossclimb is a trivia game. The player receives word clues that must fit on a grid where each new hint causes the word to alter by one letter, ultimately forming a new word.
If you don't guess the first word, I thought this one was harder than it seemed. (An more participant objected, saying it was her favorite.) Similar to Queens, this location also features a company leaderboard.
Last but not least is Pinpoint, which resembled the New York Times game Connections so much that I kept mispronouncing it as "Connections" during my interview. The object of the game is to connect the supplied words, even though they aren't revealed right away. You have to try to find the connection in the fewest number of reveals. When I first tried this, I also found it to be rather challenging.
As we've already mentioned, LinkedIn is by no means the first social network to incorporate games into the interface in an effort to boost user engagement. However, the outcomes of even the largest and priciest initiatives have been uneven. Over the years, Facebook, the largest social network globally, has played a significant role in promoting social gaming. However, in 2022, it discontinued its separate gaming app due to a decrease in usage. These days, it is giving mixed reality experiences and its Meta Quest company a lot more attention.
LinkedIn has been attempting to develop ways to encourage users to interact with its platform in a less transactional and more natural way for a long time. LinkedIn was created for professional networking and specifically for job hunting and recruitment. By their very nature, games involve transactions, but these transactions are predicated on gaming. If LinkedIn can captivate consumers with these, the expectation is that they will return for more.
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