Moving on to the New York Times, now LinkedIn is adding a brain-teasing game

Moving on to the New York Times, now LinkedIn is adding a brain-teasing game

Beware of “Connections,” LinkedIn says it’s adding a variety of games aimed at making real connections.

The Microsoft-owned platform, best known for professional networking and news sharing, is taking a page from the New York Times and adding three free “thinking-oriented” games as a way to capitalize on the popularity of brain-teasing puzzles. are adding to their daily routine.

However, LinkedIn adds its own twist to the game: Results are designed to be shared with colleagues, college alumni and colleagues at rival companies in an effort to create camaraderie among your network and perhaps spark new conversations and connections.

People are sharing articles less to advise people and more because “they’re trying to build meaningful relationships,” Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief, told CNN.

“Games, it turns out, are a really phenomenal way to do that,” he continued. “We’ve seen that with the short game explosion recently that helps you.”

What is the game?
Launching to users worldwide on Wednesday are three games designed to be completed in less than five minutes and refreshed daily. Users will see the new game module in the “LinkedIn News” box at the top right of the desktop website and in the “My Network” tab in the app.

The first game is “Pinpoint,” a simple word association game that reveals a different word each time for a total of five trials with players guessing common categories.

The second puzzle is a time-based logic game called “Queens,” with the goal of adding a crown emoji in each row, column and color-coded area of the board without the emojis touching each other.

The third is a trivia game called “Crossclimb,” which LinkedIn describes as “a combination of a crossword and a word ladder,” where players use your trivia prowess and your own word library to fill in the words arranged in a ladder.

As players guess words, they rearrange them so that each word in the ladder differs by just one letter, which then reveals the final clue to winning “Crossclimb.”

LinkedIn’s expansion into gaming shows that some people are using it to replace more traditional forms of social media and have more fun using it, according to Minda Smiley, senior analyst for social media at Emarketer.

“It’s no longer just a place for work updates and work anniversaries. The company’s move into gaming appears to capitalize on that behavior, though whether consumers will embrace it is a different story,” he told CNN.

Links between news and games
While the Times may control the cultural zeitgeist with its games like Wordle, the combination of games and news is nothing new: The first crossword puzzle appeared in the New York World newspaper more than 110 years ago.

Roth said that seeing the explosion in Wordle’s popularity, especially during the pandemic when people are looking for connections, “was an eye-opener” because of the social component to people sharing their results.

Ultimately, the Times game has become a major revenue driver for the newspaper. For LinkedIn, the goal is to become another tool for users to expand their network, while having fun.

“It’s all about helping you stretch and train your mind, but more importantly how it helps you really connect,” Laura Lorenzetti, executive editor for LinkedIn News, told CNN.

“Any games we add to the suite will make sure they fit that ethos and hopefully in a year people will still be playing these games and talking to each other,” he said.

If the game is successful, Smiley said it could encourage users to “not only spend more time on the platform — something that’s attractive to advertisers — but post more as well, because they might be prompted to share their scores.”

“While this feature is ad-free for now, that could change in the future, especially as LinkedIn makes moves to build its advertising business,” he said, but warned LinkedIn not to “throw spaghetti against the wall in hopes of keeping users around, because it is still seen primarily as a place for career-related discussion and networking.”