LinkedInthe social network intended for professionals, becomes a little more relaxed.
The site has added a trio of games to its member offerings, all of which loosely follow the Wordle model that has been so successful since The New York Times.
Locate, Queens And Cross race, all three games, can each be played once per day. Once you finish playing the game, you will be able to see statistics about your gaming history, including your high score and daily streak. You will also see who in your network has played.
The results can be posted to your LinkedIn feed, a somewhat risky move for a social media network where posts are typically related to news and thought leadership. The Microsoft-owned company hopes the game’s results will spark conversations and perhaps create additional connections.
Each game takes approximately five minutes. You can find the three titles on the LinkedIn Games Page or on the first page of the site under the LinkedIn News tab. Locate is a word association game. Your goal is to guess which category the words belong to using as few clues as possible. Queens is a sudoku-like game that avoids numbers and requires you to place the queen on a grid in a pattern where there is only one per row and per column (and they can never be in adjacent squares) . Cross racemeanwhile, asks you to create a ladder of words that vary by a single letter (i.e. “lamp” and “piece”).
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn hopes the shift to these types of games will attract more viewers and bring them back more regularly.
“We want to give people a way to exercise their brains while taking a little break, but also give them a reason to connect with others,” Daniel Roth, editor-in-chief and vice president of LinkedIn, said in a blog post. “We hope these games will spark jokes, conversations and even healthy competition among professionals around the world.”
There is precedent for this. Axios reports THE Times saw its games played more than 8 billion times last year, with the majority of them coming from Wordle players, including the Times acquired in 2022. Building on this success, other companies I added games to their range in recent years, from Vulture to Netflix.
