LinkedIn, the social media site for professionals, is loosening up a bit.
The site has added a trio of games to its offerings for members, all of which loosely follow the very successful Wordle model The New York Times.
Exactly, Queens And Cross climbThe three games can each be played once per day. Once you have finished the sport, you will have the opportunity to see metrics about your gameplay, including high rating and every day streak. You may also see who has played in your network.
Results might be published to your LinkedIn feed, a somewhat dangerous move for a social media network where posts generally relate to news and thought leadership. The Microsoft-owned company hopes the sport results will spark conversations and potentially create additional connections.
Each game lasts about five minutes. You can find all three titles on the LinkedIn gaming page or on the homepage of the location under the “LinkedIn News” tab. Exact is a word association game. Your goal is to guess the category the words fit into with as few clues as possible. Queens is a Sudoku-like game that foregoes numbers and requires you to put a queen on a grid in a pattern where there is simply one queen per row and column (they usually can never be on adjoining squares). Cross climbMeanwhile, you have created a ladder with words that differ by a single letter (e.g., “lamp” and “lump”).
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn hopes that moving into some of these games will appeal more to viewers and produce them back more frequently.
“We want to give people the opportunity to exercise their brains while taking a short break, but also give them a reason to connect with others,” Daniel Roth, editor-in-chief and vice chairman at LinkedIn, said in a blog post. “We hope these games spark banter, conversation and even some serious competition among professionals around the world.”
There is a precedent for this. Axios Reports The Just Its games were played greater than 8 billion times last 12 months, with most games coming from Wordle players Just acquired in 2022. Inspired by this success, other corporations have expanded their offerings to incorporate games lately, from Vulture to Netflix.