Ethics and the Future of Play

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Taxes and fees extra? See Mint Mobile for details. got a riddle for you. Name's something that we all do as children, something that's considered good and important, but when we do it as adults, it's often looked down on. Got it? What's your answer? That's right. The answer. is play. Social scientists have generated a lot of evidence that playing is good for us. According to one widely cited study, play contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children. playing of games is thought to be especially valuable. And why is that? In 1978, the Canadian philosopher Bernard Suitz published a sly and influential little book called The Grasshopper, Games, Life, and Utopia, in which he defined gameplaying as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Which, to me at least, could sound like a definition of life itself. In both life and games there are constraints. Some of them artificial. There is luck. Uncertainty? There's limited information. There are tradeoffs between risk and reward. and also pressure, which tends to scramble our decision making. There's also the fact that over time we have invented so many types of games for so many types of players. And they serve so many different functions. Games Laboratory, an escape. Anything, really. And you can see it in the numbers. According to the American Time Use Survey, playing games is our number two leisure activity. Number one is watching TV, and a lot of what we watch is live sports, which are Yes. So today on Free Economics Radio The first of what we hope will be a recurring series on the joys. Perils and the absurdity of games. Within minutes, there were strangers eight and ten deep. On each other's laps. In this episode we will hear about game design and we will ask if the New York Times is becoming a games company. The New York Times is not becoming a games company. what we play, why we play, and what it does for us. All that starts now. This is Freekonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Steven Dubner. I grew up the youngest in a big family. So I spent a lot of time chasing down the big kids to play whatever games they were willing to play. Board games like Monopoly, card games like Casino. Any sport with a ball. Those are my favorite. My brother said, Okay, here's the game. I'm gonna throw this baseball at you as hard as I can. and you have to catch it without a glove? play that game too. These days, my games are a bit safer, mostly backgammon and golf. By the way. I'm not making this episode to try to talk any of you into playing backgammon or golf, but When I say that I truly love them. bring a lot of joy to my life, please know that I am telling the truth. It's taken me a while to admit this. Once you become an adult I feel there's a lot of pressure to put away childish things. I've come to think that's a mistake. I have come to think that games and play are good for the soul. So I wanted to speak with someone who knows a lot about that. The first game I remember playing was with my father. I should say he passed away when I was five. These are some of my earliest childhood memories. is Eric Zimmerman. I'm a game designer and I'm also a professor. Of game design. The NYU game center. That's in Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in New York City. One was my father would play that. riddle game where you can Try and figure out what's going on by asking yes or no questions. For example the game of like Someone walks into an elevator. pushes the button for floor six. then gets out and walks up two floors to their apartment. Why? then you can only try and figure out this mystery by asking yes or no questions. The answer to this riddle is that the person in the elevator is too short to reach the button for the eighth floor, so they press the highest one they can reach, six, and they walk the rest of the way. That was like a logical game of deduction. At the same time, we had games of pure physical play. We had a game called Monzo, which is basically wrestling, except you would yell out, Monzo! Kick the Can, Ghost in the Graveyard, Dodgeball, Dirt Bike Races. I made games with neighborhood kids that had to do with spaceships and Star Wars figures. The first game maybe I made from scratch, it was for a project. It might have been in fifth grade. I laid down on a piece of poster board and traced my body and we made a little track going from my mouth. winding through my, you know, belly into a stomach and small intestine. It was called the digestive game. I don't think it was very fun. You played a food particle. At the beginning of the game, you picked a card and you were a protein fat or carbohydrate particle, I guess. And then certain things would happen to you on certain spaces. And there was a reverse peristalsis space, which made you go back to start, which was vomiting. You got vomited up. And of course the goal was to get pooped out the butt, which was a lovely thing for a fifth grader to be able to talk about with my whole class. Can I just start by asking you like what you think are either the best games ever or maybe just your favorite games? Wow, it's a hard question to answer because it's like asking a painter what their favorite color is. The most influential game I think in contemporary game culture it's probably Dungeons and Dragons. That is such a weird, rich, interesting game that maybe isn't even a game because it's more like an interactive storytelling engine with a simulation system attached to it. But there's so many concepts in contemporary Games things like classes and levels and points and experience and you know, weapons and damage and things like that that are just shot through all kinds of contemporary video and tabletop games today. But I could also answer it and just say that the last game I played was at a party a few nights ago, someone pulled out Flip seven. which is so the opposite of Dungeons and Dragons. There's no narrative attached. It's very, very simple. You play it in one setting and it's just a lovely, elegant little Party game that A little like Batgame and also has a wonderful escalation. So Eric, you teach game design at the NYU game center. What would you say to someone who is surprised to hear that a university like NYU has a game center? American universities are fairly capitalist institutions and they're driven by Consumer interest. If students want to study something then universities will provide it. We started the NYU Game Center about 15 years ago and I started teaching game design Way before that in the nineteen nineties. There was a cultural shift in games when I started Working in the game industry and teaching game design in the mid-1990s, games were thought of as childish. And violent and addictive. Junk food at best. Absolutely the junk food of cultural cuisine. Things shifted so that finally programs at universities didn't have to call themselves interactive media. We were of that generation of programs that could unapologetically call ourselves game design. While it's true that students want to take those classes, so that's in part why the university started the program, there did have to be sort of a cultural reckoning that had to happen. Beyond teaching, Zimmerman has designed dozens of games over his career, including Diner Dash, one of the biggest casual computer games of the early 2000s. In Diner Dash, you play a restaurant server scrambling to keep up with impatient customers. Zimmermann did not start out in game design. He studied painting at the University of Pennsylvania. Teachers in art school. Were what I would call High modernists. So they were really all about pure visual qualities of painting. They would say things like, there are no ideas in art. Fine art is about line, color, and composition, and that Fine art was not about Narrative. or even psychology, certainly not making statements about culture. They were all students of Joseph Albers. Joseph Albers was a German artist who came to the United States and taught at Yale University. He wrote this amazing book called Interaction of Color. Imagine that you have two little tall rectangles of color. Let's say that they were both kind of like a pinkish yellow or something like that. Can you put those two strips on two different backgrounds, two larger rectangles? So that they looked as different as possible. Wow, here it looks like a lemon yellow and there it looks like almost a reddish pink. I can't believe that that's the same little strip. But because of the relativity of color, the interaction of color, we could make them look very different. So that was what I was being taught that art was about. Meanwhile. organize a carload of art students to go up to New York City and people were doing completely nothing to do with what we were studying. This was in the late eighties, early nineties, the AIDS crisis was going on, conceptual art, political art was the rage. I was looking at artists like Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer. feminist artists, artists that were critiquing with media, the gorilla girls doing performance art in the Museum of Modern Art. It was a really exciting time, had nothing to do with this high modernism. It was postmodernism. And so Why am I going into all of this? Because as a game designer Today actually want to hold on to both of those roots of my heritage. On the one hand, a lot of my career as a game designer, and then later as a writer, working with Katie Salin to write rules of play, starting to teach game design with Frank Lance at NYU, and now I've been teaching for 30 years, I really was interested in, okay, what B the line, color, and composition. of games. If we were gonna talk about the essential formal structures of games, what would they be? What would the sort of systems thinking, structural thinking, what's the relationship between rules that we write and the play that happens? And I think that's really important to understand what is unique and interesting about this medium or this cultural forum in which I'm working. Zimmermann's book, Rules of Play, is now considered a defining textbook of game design. is game design and what isn't it? Often when I tell people that I am a game designer, they assume I'm a programmer or they might assume I'm a visual designer, but I'm neither of those things, although I can program a little bit and I can do a little bit of visual design. Really game designers make rules. So if you think about A board game. What does a game designer do? It's not about the illustrations on the card. It's about the structure of the experience. What's the gameplay? What do you do on a turn? How do you win the game? all of those aspects of the game that have to do with the rules of play. That's what a game designer focuses on. Design is a process and it's a process of iteration because. Games are these spaces of possibility where players will do unpredictable things. You never know what's gonna work, what's not gonna work, what's gonna be confusing, what's gonna be engaging. What's your definition of a game? games are, whether you play them or design them, is they're at this funny intersection of mathematics and logic and formal structures, but also the opposite of all of that. which is human experience and emotion and drama and play. A definition that Someone told us along the way. was it's like the willful Collegial adoption of random seeming or Crazy seeming rules. We're gonna play this game. Where The objective is clear and the play may be clear and the rules may be clear, but they're not necessarily logical. Then the beauty part is once you agree with your fellow competitors that these are the rules and we're not going to break them. Then I feel you've entered into this new space and It lets you be not necessarily a different person, but a different version of you and get lost in that. Getting lost in a game is so essential, and I actually think that People often misunderstand what it means to get lost in a game with a rise of 3D cinematically realistic video games. People often mistake this idea of immersion or deep engagement with the way something looks. It's not that at all. You can get deeply engaged in backgammon and there's nothing illusionistic about it. You're not entering into a 3D world. when you play backgammon the space is a social space, it's a cognitive space, it's a psychological space, it's a strategic space. One really powerful way that I think about games as a designer in the way that I teach game design Create meaning. players. If you have a chess board On your coffee table. It can mean a lot of things. You know, it can mean, hey, look at me, I'm an intellectual person. I have a chess board at home, or maybe it's a Simpsons chess set, so it means, oh, I'm an ironic You know, cartoon aficionado. If you and I sit down to play the game Then suddenly there's a whole new lattice work of meanings like spring up around the game. Time is divided up. Is it my turn or your turn? The sweetest pleasure for me as a game designer is seeing players do things and express themselves in ways that you never could have anticipated in advance. Just like the rules of grammar can't explain You know, Shakespeare, it's just the structural rules of grammar. What people do with them is where the play happens. Okay. So ten or twelve years ago, you wrote a short piece, a really good piece called Manifesto for a Ludic Century Ludic. Coming from the Latin Ludus, meaning playful. Why do you claim that the twenty first century is a ludic century? Peace is about Looking at What happened? Art, entertainment, media. in our present time. This is a gross, gross, gross generalization. But let's say, for example, that in the 20th century, the moving image was a dominant, if not the dominant form of cultural expression, right? In terms of advertising, in terms of Large cultural myths that were spun out in terms of news, in terms of personal stories, cultural narratives. film and television were a dominant form. For me, the traditional idea of the moving image, you know, initially was this darken theater where you have this. immersive experience with the screen and it's very linear and enclosed. Then at the end of the twentieth century something happened The rise of digital technology And media and art and entertainment shifted somehow. When I think about the ways that our lives are completely enmeshed in Systems of digital technology and the networked information, the way that we work. the way that we learn, the way that we socialize and flirt and romance, the way that we conduct our finances and connect with our governments. All of these key aspects of our lives are completely intertwined with Digital networks of information. the way our media is constructed has also shifted. So that if information in The Twentieth century was, let's say, an encyclopedia set, which were these experts publishing data and facts. were then collected into the static package that then you could buy and own. Wikipedia is the model for the encyclopedia in the twenty first century, which is that it's not a fixed static thing. In fact, it's not about experts handing down information. It's a community where the users blur with the authors. That's this bubbling cauldron of changing policies. and roiling politics and ever shifting notions of what's happening on a particular topic. Now how does this connect to games? Well Games are an ancient form of human expression. Which for me always been about systems of information. In other words, a chess board is a rule based state machine. And playing chess or playing Go or even playing a sport is about exploring the permutations of the system. What can I do? How can I interact with this system? The point of the Ludicury is that Games can be a way of understanding the way that media and culture and entertainment are shifting in our present day. Now games are not the only way of understanding this shift. I realize I have a bias as a game designer, but I do think that They also point towards maybe an interesting Playful future where we can think about things like what makes something beautiful doesn't have to necessarily be about the author creating something beautiful, but about people playing a game in a beautiful way. If you were looking for evidence that Eric Zimmerman is right to call this the Ludic Century, at least from a commercial perspective, Consider the following numbers. The video game market today is valued at nearly $200 billion. up from just $13 billion at the turn of the 21st century. That makes the video game industry bigger than the movie and music industries combined. Another indicator that an industry has a lot of momentum is when firms outside the industry try to piggyback. Think about AI right now and all the firms trying to attach themselves to it. One recent example is Allbirds, the shoe company, which recently announced it is selling its shoe business and moving into AI infrastructure. Is there a similar example in the gaming industry? Well, maybe not quite as drastic as Allbirds, but consider the New York Times, where I happen to work years ago. The Times is, of course, primarily a news gathering organization, but in recent years it has fully embraced games. Games are transforming the Times' business model. The idea that the New York Times is actually one of the world's biggest publishers of games is not a sentence that one would have thought to say twenty years ago. As an institution, the New York Times is a very long relationship to games because they have been the absolute world center of crossword puzzle culture for decades. It makes sense to me that They were building on that. cultural embrace of games and some of that internal knowledge about players and the integration of smart, interesting language and culture based games into their readership. They're Digital games are really lovely. And they're wonderful examples of good design in terms of graphic design, interaction design. I say this with great pride that Many of the people that are staffing the New York Times Games department are my former students. So how did the New York Times become one of the world's biggest publishers of games? I called up someone who could explain. Her name is Alex Hardeman, and she is Chief Product Officer at the New York Times. Nice to talk to you. It's really nice to talk to you too. I was actually telling my husband about my day to day, and he reminded me that when I first joined the New York Times in Two thousand six I was doing product marketing and advertising My first week on the job. I came home and I was like, guess what I got to do today? He's like, what? Now you said to figure out how to sell sponsorships for the Flekenomics blog. I have made it. Okay, so First of all, thank you for selling ads on the blog way back then. I have read, Alex, that you had your sight set on working at the time since you were young. What would have been your dream job? I grew up in a family of mainly broadcast journalists. I knew I wasn't going to be great at the reporting and the writing. I was always more of a tinker and a builder. Coming into product marketing role and advertising actually got me more exposed to The newsroom and the tech teams and the idea of trying to figure out how to take this. hundred fifty years of extraordinary journalism and transform it for much more of a digital era. I shifted pretty quickly actually into becoming one of the first mobile product managers at the company. at a time when no one really understood what product was, but we figured it out. When you say that we figured it out, I think that's understating it quite a bit. It's been a remarkable story to me as someone outside the times now for a long time, but who used to be there. The story that I tell myself in my head is that Times legendarily successful and great news institution for many years, ebbs and flows like anything does. There was a period where a lot of things were fraught. There was a lot of change and advertising revenue was dissipating and so on. And this is the part that I'm sure you object to. that games especially and other digital products, food also. kind of saved the New York Times. It's not the first time I've heard that theory at all. So let's get into it. ten to eleven years ago we were print first business and ad first business and To be honest, we didn't really have a very clear path to growth. We only had about a million digital subscribers. We actually had a shrinking newsroom of about 1,300 journalists. Playing good defense, we were really trying to stay afloat. Economists always like to say that newspapers were the best local monopoly ever. They were the place for people to advertise for many, many things, jobs. Real estate, cars for sale, legal notices, et cetera, et cetera. Can you just talk about how that monopoly had come under assault? This is a story that many in the journalism industry were facing. You started with classifieds and Craigslist came out and really disrupted. entire classifieds business. Then we saw the advent of web 2.0 with search and social. What we saw with this digital transformation in this moment is the funnels, the way that you would discover audiences were fundamentally changing. We saw a lot of news organizations doing what felt was genuinely the right decision at the time, which was let's unbundle our content. Let's chase traffic through search and social. and really try to hold on to the ad-first business that we had had for many decades. Today, we're in a very, very different place. In a given week, we reach anywhere from fifty to a hundred million people. on our various apps and websites. And we've basically figured out how to build a durable business that is growing sustainably every year. didn't happen by accident. In 2015, we decided that we were gonna go against the grain. And we were going to be subscription first. We were going to be destination first and we were going to prioritize this idea of direct relationships. But my sense is that by twenty fifteen, the Times was already late to the subscription game. Years earlier, the Wall Street Journal started charging. They said, hey, it's very expensive to produce news. We're not going to give it away for free on our website, but the Times Pretty much did that for years. So what was the sentiment in the building at that time? So we launched our digital subscription model actually a little earlier in twenty eleven. We came in with a lot of conviction to say that over the next ten, twenty, thirty years. We believe that we are going to help make a market. paid high quality journalism. It was a very, very nascent market. But by 2015, we did see enough signal in the market. There was Giant demand first and foremost for news. And news is the largest and the most important value that we made back then and that we continue to make today. I think this is a really, really important point before we get into games or cooking or sports. News drives the majority of our audience our engagement and our revenue. We sort of have the solar system analogy. News is the sun and it really gives light. and permission for us to then plan these other areas that connect to people's passion spaces in their lives. But are games at the times becoming their own center of gravity? That's coming up after the break. This is Freeconomics Radio, and I'm Steven Dubner. Free economics radio is sponsored Acrobat. We all know sending a file is easy, making sure your clients understand the file is the hard part, but with PDF spaces in Adobe Acrobat, you can give your clients the full picture with custom intros, audio summaries, and a helpful AI assistant to your docs. So if you want to stop the endless follow-ups do that with Acrobat. Need to make your docs crystal? Do that with Acrobat. Wanna make sure your clients get everything they need to hear? Do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. 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Especially when you're sweating, moving, or pushing through a long day. one into a bottle and it dissolves quickly. Tastes great and comes in a simple no-mess tube you can take anywhere. And at less than $1 per serving, it's easy to make part of your routine. Noon is made for people who show up, value growth, and find joy in the effort. It helps support clear focus, steady energy, and the mindset to take on whatever comes next. Shop noonhydration at noonlife.com. That's n-u-nlife.com and fuel your next hard thing. The New York Times, before it was pro-game. was anti-game. Its rival newspaper, the New York World, published the first modern crossroad puzzle in 1913. The world was essentially a tabloid, whereas the Times was the paper of record. It also became known as the Grey Lady. Times' slogan was all the news that's fit The implication being that the Tim found many things unfit. including crossroad puzzles. In 1924, the Times published an editorial about what it called the craze over crossroad puzzles. Here's a passage from that piece. Scarcely recovered from the form of temporary madness. made so many people pay enormous prices for Mahjong sets. The same persons now are committing the same sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words, the letters of which will fit into a prearrang. What a difference a century makes. We have tens of millions of people who Come to our games every single day. again is New York Times Chief Product Officer Alex Hardiman. Just last year I was looking this up before because I wanted to to kind of understand how many times our puzzles were played. 11.2 billion times. That includes their now iconic crossroad puzzle. We've launched the crossword, our very first game. In February of 1942, we felt that the psyche of the country needed after the attack on Pearl Harbor. We wanted to still help people use their minds. We didn't want them to turn them off. And so we really tried to create a crossroad puzzle that would offer Challenge and wit and cultural context still inside the news report. Even though we didn't have the language of time well spent, That was really at the crux of it. I think it was eleven days after the attack on Pearl Harbor that Lester Markle, who was the Sunday editor of the Times sent a memo to the paper's publisher, Arthur Salzberger, and he wrote, We ought to proceed with the puzzle, especially in view of the fact that it is possible there will now be bleak hours. Or if not that, then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind or other. When I read that, Alex, I just have to wonder how you feel about the mission or purpose of games in our current moment. We're not exactly at war with the rest of the world, but it's starting to feel it. So What are the conversations like inside the building about the functions that games are serving for let's call it the public psyche? I think it serves the same purpose. People need and want to be as informed about what is happening geopolitically. They also want to have a moment of joy, sometimes solo and sometimes with friends and family. And we want game experiences that are designed to help you relax, to maybe learn something new to challenge yourself. We're not in the business of building games that are escapist and take you down unexpected rabbit holes or that are exploitative. This is something that Eric Zimmerman also said about the Times' games. In the mobile game space, there's often this desire to just squeeze as much time and money out of players. The New York Times philosophy is not that at all. They're not trying to trick you into spending more time there or getting addicted to their games. They also respect you through the sophistication of the visual language. the cleverness of the game design itself. I really have wonderful things to say about the New York Times games. But how wonderful is too wonderful. I went back to Alex Hardeman with a fairly obnoxious question. If tomorrow The New York Times stopped reporting on, let's say, the Iran War in the White House and global economics. I'm sure it would cause a lot of trouble for the business model of the New York Times and for the everyday function of the New York Times. But I don't know. how many people would actually feel totally bereft. Whereas I would imagine that if Wirtle were taken away. that your barricades would be stormed and your building might be graffitied or worse. Tell me where I'm wrong there. to say it, I think you're wrong. Really wrong. The New York Times is not becoming a games company. We really see persistent demand for everything that we do. Our games get massive attention because they are uniquely good. Also because they are associated with a world class brand. that really stands for making you more thoughtful every single day. I ran into an old friend, I knew him from the Times and he's still at the Times and he lodged a complaint that I've never heard any journalist lodge ever, which is that there are almost too many journalists at the New York Times now. He felt like he had to work harder and harder to come up with pieces that were gonna get him in the paper. If you've been following the news industry for the past 30 years, you'd say, oh my gosh, what an amazingly great problem. Because the other side of that story is all these different papers around the world that are closing. So I asked him, How do you feel about that success? And he said, Well I wish there was as much pop attached to what I'm doing as there is to games. I Really agree, I think, with two distinct things that that person is feeling. One is It is such a privilege and a duty to make sure that we are building a bigger business at the New York Times so that the first dollar goes back into the newsroom, always. At a time when There is so much slop and dubious information. What we do around Original high quality. fresh, accurate journalism that is human made and human reported. Unfortunately, it's becoming more scarce, but it also is becoming so much more valuable. Back in twenty twenty two. We came out and we said our strategy is to be the essential subscription for any curious person around the world who wants to Not only understand the information that's happening around them, but really engage with it. We want to get to 15 million subscribers by 2027 and we want to be bigger after that. Where are you now? We're almost at about thirteen million subscribers, so I feel like we are on a very confident path to get to 15. This is where games becomes really interesting because you might come in for Wordle or the Mini Crossword. And then you might find yourself watching last night's video highlights from the Knicks game. You might find yourself really immersing yourself in live coverage of the Artemis 2 lunar flyby, which was just this wondrous piece of recording from our science desk. And it helps bring people. into the New York Times portfolio, but without any gotchas, without any gimmicks. the sense that we can provide joy in a very transparent way that you control. And that's what time spent really means for us. For someone who plays your games, they're just seeing the end product. But what goes into making a successful game? There are Creators and editors and the rest of the publishing team that makes the game good and makes it run reliably every day and part of that larger infrastructure, I guess. So talk to me about that. The blood, the sweat, the tears that go into all of it. Yeah. Part of what makes for a successful game is not just the what, it's the how. Years ago, and I really credit Jonathan Knight for bringing this type of approach into the company, we created almost like a new games RD lab. This lab is really meant with nurturing creativity and new game ideas, and new game idea can come from anywhere. Inside or outside of the game's team even. Can you name a game itself or a type of game that you thought would work that didn't? One example is a game called Digits. You might remember it. I do remember that. I liked digits. I did too. I think we were the only two though. Well, there were some others, but It just wasn't as great. We tried twice. People are scared of math. Bring it back. We already did bring it back a second time and it still didn't work, so I think we're done. The digits. is Jonathan Knight, whom Alex Hardeman just mentioned. SVP and general manager for New York Times Games. Night came to the Times not via journalism, but via gaming. I was the general manager at Zinga, running big teams that were doing live Facebook games and eventually mobile games. I worked on the Farmville franchise as a GM. I ran Words with Friends for a while at Zinga. Done a lot of things in my career, worked a lot of different kinds of video games, but I have leaned casual And I liked casual games growing up. Everything from chess, checkers, quandary, and then all the classics, risk monopoly. But my father was kind of a board game collector, so he would order stuff from the UK. We got a very early copy of civilization. He had this game called Sea Strike, which was like a World War II like submarine. Battler that took the whole dining room table and twelve hours to play. My mother was really thrilled with that one. I'm of the belief that games are for everyone, that everyone is a gamer, even if they object, you know, oh, that's not me. I'm not a gamer. I don't play games. And then you find out like, Okay, what are you doing on Thursday? Well, I'm playing bridge with the neighbors. Okay, bridge is a game. You know, what do you do on your phone right now? Well, I'm doing the Wordle, but that's not a game. Wordle most definitely is a game. New York Times game, in which you have six tries to guess a five-letter word, it has been a huge part of the Times' gaming success, but the Times did not invent Wordle. Wardle was created by a guy named Josh Wardle. He was an engineer who had been at Reddit. This was actually Josh's second attempt at World. He'd written it, he'd put it down, he'd come back to it. The New York Times has made a lot of acquisition over the years. Some of them famously bad. There was about.com, which ended in a $20 million write down. Times paid more than a billion dollars for the Boston Globe. And ultimately sold it for just seventy million dollars. Wirtle has gone a long way toward making up for those failures. Here's the story of how the Times got Wirtle from Josh Wardle. built it for friends and family and it started to gain momentum really in twenty twenty-one. It got to a place where He added in a viral mechanic that had grown out of the community feedback, which was those little green and gray. emoji squares that you can post after you're done and that. really started to generate a lot of interest. This was during the pandemic. This was sort of peak Twitter. We actually did an article about the game that came out of our newsroom. Which was published on January third of twenty twenty two. The game had about 300,000 users at that point. And was definitely going viral. I read that article that morning, a bunch of people forwarded it to me. and said, hey, you know, are you guys looking at Wordle? I got on the phone with Josh I think two days later. I had COVID. I was really, really sick and in bed. We knew that we needed to move very quickly and So got to know him as fast as I could and we just started talking. We announced on January thirty first to the world that we'd acquired Wordle. It was really thrilling. The Times won't divulge what it paid for Wordle, but it was reported to be in the low seven figures. And how many new users did Wordle bring to the Times? We never disclosed that number, but we're talking tens of millions. You know, he was eager to sell the game. It had blown up beyond his wildest expectations and he had something else he wanted to go do and he didn't want to be Spinning all day, every day, looking after Wordle. We were really interested in being good stewards of Wordle. It already looked and played like a New York Times game, very clean, very elegant. And it didn't need really anything done to it. to slot right into our portfolio, which was rare. And so it was a good fit. It has been such a good fit that Wordle is being developed as a TV show to air on NBC in prime time. The Times itself will co-produce. So what did Wordle do for the Times' bigger games strategy? games even without Wordle was growing and thriving. All of it was sort of working and then we just got this turbo boost that helped accelerate all of our ambitions and it's been great. I have to say I did not like today's word. You remember what it was? I'm struggling to remember the word. I got it in five, though, so I probably didn't like it either. Yeah, it was elfin. Oh. You know what? You've just spoiled the Wordle for me. I actually haven't done it today. I was thinking of yesterday. Sorry about that. Oh, that's fine. It's another whirl in one for me. No big deal. Let me ask you this. What are the criteria you're looking for in a new game? First and foremost, we think about, is the game fun? Are you gonna come back to it tomorrow? Are you gonna come back in a week? Is it creating that sense of accomplishment and reward? That's always the mindset. The sooner we can prototype it, get it into the hands of the people on the team to get a sense for it. then as soon as we can get it into user testing and then we ultimately want to get it out to some sort of market. These days we're testing in Canada in a geo locked fashion. So we can get A fair amount of users but not have it run away from us before we're sure that we want to invest in it. At that point, we're looking at real data, you know, the D1, the D seven, the D thirty. a number of other metrics, but like are people coming back? Why do people come back? They come back because it's fun and it has a sense of achievement and Not too hard, not too easy, but more importantly, if I do solve it, was it the right kind of solve? Like did I feel like I solved something worth solving? You're saying if I'm a New York Times games or bundle subscriber who lives in Canada, I'm getting games now that Americans aren't getting. Is that right? When we're in a period of testing a new game, which will usually be just a couple of months, we expose it to Canadian users only. Is that just because they're so kind and you know their feedback will be gentle and useful? part also because their metrics and their behaviors are almost identical to the US. We test it on web only for our Canadian users and we give them access through the Wordle hamburger menu, which is a great access point. We obviously don't have to do any marketing for that. People find it, they start playing it, and it just gives us a fairly small contained audience relative to the full market. You mentioned D one, D seven, and D thirty metrics. Explain, please. Day one retention, day seven retention, day thirty retention. This is kinda the magic. can give you a real sense of the growth. and longevity potential of the game. There are other things we look at, but retention is first and foremost. Once you're getting users in, if you've got a good retention profile, you can start to predict the future of the game. I would guess, but please tell me if I'm wrong here that if retention is a goal, then there's a trade off between how hard a game can be and how successful it will be. Have there been cases where you wanted to make a game a little bit harder, but were worried that it would drive people away? We just went through the opposite case. We had a game recently that had a very low solve rate and a low return rate. We made it easier in the testing process. We got that solve rate up. But we weren't able to move the retention and ultimately decided to not go forward the puzzle. I won't get into what that puzzle was. Can you give me a sense of the nature of it? Well that's more of a logic puzzle, which logic puzzles have lower retention in general versus word puzzles. Connections kind of bucks that trend and it shows that there is both art and science here. Connections has a very volatile solve rate, and I would say on average is one of our lower solve rates. When we first started testing it, we were kind of nervous because we saw that, but it had excellent retention. On days when it's hard, what we just found was that even if you didn't solve it, but it was so fun and satisfying or frustrating or whatever. You wanted to come back and try again the next day. But other puzzles we find that if you don't solve them, they're just frustrating for people and they don't want to come back. People come back for things that make them feel good. And Wordle, which is our biggest game, has a very high solve rate. Over ninety percent of people that start Wordle solve it. Is there any AI strategy in your portfolio as well, Jonathan? If anything, doubling down. on the notion of human made puzzles. We are seeing that consumers can really sniff out a machine made game. Even before AI you could go online and you can get Wortle clones. For our puzzles put so much care, even with Wordle, which is a very simple game, even how we started this conversation, you're not happy with the Wordle today. There is that sense of like that was a good wordle. That wasn't a good word. That word's wordly. Well, what does it mean to be wordily? Well, I don't know. We just know because we all play wordle and That Tracy Bennett ran a word today that had two Zs in it. I had a guy come up to me just like three days ago going, are you running double letters and words now? You didn't used to do that. That's a new thing, isn't it? Wait, that's not new, is it? It's not. These conversations are what it's all about, and that's because there's a human behind it. Picking a five letter word every day might not seem like that complicated of a job, but when you think about the trend over time and the cadence of what are we doing this week, last week, next week. But something like connections, we've spoken to AI companies that say that their models don't know how to solve connections still. There's something about the misdirects and Just the way that that puzzle tries to trick you, that is really special and hard to replicate. In these times people are really Valuing human made. Content and because it's the New York Times, like if you beat a New York Times puzzle, you're not just beating any human, you're beating like a New York Times human, which gives you a sort of satisfaction, right? that you're a little smarter. You figured out what those people in the New York Times buildings are trying to do to you. Coming up after the break. Can the times keep its winning streak going? Also, if you have any foreign policy questions that you're dying to ask, let me know. We'll be having Fireed Zakaria back on the show soon, and I'd love to know what you want to know. Send an email to radio at freeconomics.com. Subject line for read. I'm Steven Dubner. This is Free Economics Radio. We'll be right back. Pre-Conomics Radio is sponsored by Drip Drop. Drip Drop is doctor-developed proven fast hydration that helps your body and mind work better. Think support for busy days, long workouts, and everything in between. Trusted by firefighters, medical professionals, and over 90% of top college and pro sports teams. Drip Drop uses science-based formulas for rapid hydration so you feel results fast while getting three times the electrolytes of leading sports drinks. 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No tricks or pressure, just flexibility and real value. for straightforward savings on your next stay, trust the hotel experts. Visit hotels.com. It's all in the name. The runaway success of the New York Times' gaming business. You might assume that every other media outlet is trying to clone this strategy, and you would be correct. I definitely see other media entities trying to replicate the success of the New York Times. New Yorker magazine, Atlantic magazine, they all have their own little game division. again is Eric Zimmerman, the game designer and professor at NYU's Game Center. It's a funny thing that happens in the commercial game industry. There's a new platform or revenue model. which gets more and more ridiculously intense until people just reject it and then move on to the next thing. For example. If you remember, there was this wild popularity in Facebook games like Farmville. fifteen, twenty years ago. And Those kinds of games, but they just got so cheesy in how they were just Trying to Steal every possible minute of your time and that kind of thing. And then players wise up and reject it and move on. So there's a lot of short term gain in following these trends, but I think that it's not necessarily a way to build a long lasting relationship with players. In 2010, when Facebook was still relatively young, Farmville drew 83 million monthly players, with Facebook taking a 30% cut on all in-game purchases. This generated enough cash to reshape Facebook's business model. By twenty twelve, when Facebook went public, twelve percent of their revenues came from Zinga games. Industry analysts heralded this ecosystem as the undisputed future of the internet. until the bubble was burst by player fatigue. And Facebook redirected its attention to its main moneymaker, which was advertising. I went back to Jonathan Knight, formerly of Farmville Maker Zinga now of the New York Times, to talk about the durability of gaming. remember when YouTube blew up, everybody decided that they had to have video on their sites, including the New York Times. something becomes popular and it gets not just copied, but ingrained in a lot of business programs or business models. How do you think about keeping a New York Times games audience after a particular game may fall in popularity or maybe Popular may fall across the board in games. Well, it's a great question. In general, games do rise and fall, but I don't think Games is a fad for us. clear that Wirtle was a viral phenomenon, but we're seeing incredible Resilience even from Wordle? then we do expect that desire for people to associate us with puzzles to last for a very long time. We need to keep innovating and we're always looking for new and clever puzzles to bring into the mix. New puzzles energize people. that are already engaged. They re engage people that maybe have turned out. They can help us reach brand new audiences and we're very interested in growing the overall reach of the bundle. What's your thinking on metagame features, streaks, badges, leaderboards, et cetera? Like at what point does that cross from a nice habit into gamification in the negative sense. I think that's a great point. We have our mantras. that we try to live by time well spent is one of the most important ones. We want to feel like this is your time, that we're respectful of it. Did you have agency as a user? Some people like to wake up first thing in the morning and do Wordle and connections and strands and maybe the MIDI and then their brain is awake and they go about their day. Other people like to wind down with our games at night or maybe in line at the dentist office or. your kid from school. We don't want you in the app all day, every day. I don't even measure minutes per day or minutes per session. To your question, we've been I would say very thoughtful about these metagame experiences. We do have streaks. We're very purist when it comes to streaks. Like if you break your streak, you break your streak. We're not in the business of allowing you to pay money to keep your street going and all of that. It's not who we are, but We do have a segment that is focused on achievement and they care about points and score and care about how many times they've gotten Wortalin three, they care about getting purple first. And connections. I'm coming up on a hundred purple firsts myself and I'm excited about that badge. Congratulations. Cross play is a pretty new game and it's your first multiplayer game. Is it considered successful so far within the building? Absolutely. You have to create an account with the New York Times to play because it's a two player game. So we're seeing it drive a lot of new registered users. It has some of the best retention that I've ever seen in my career. And we should say, I mean, you won't like to hear me say the word rip off, but crossplay essentially scrabble with some slight differences. I would say that cross play is first and foremost a very clean and simple and elegant take on that category, which we think the world very much needs right now. a sea of mobile games that have become a morass of treasure chests and coins and ads and pop-ups and aggressive monetization tactics. We think that that category deserves just a clean classic board game. vibe. We've also built something called game review, which is powered by the crosspot. When you're done with the game of cross play, you can go through every move you made, what would have been a better move, opportunities you missed. Most games, they just want your engagement. We're trying to say look, we want to you actually improve and get better at this game because if you're better at it, you're gonna feel better about it. This gets us deeper into why we play games. Yes, there's an entertainment value. But how about a social though? For this, I went back to Eric Zimmerman.