675. Has the New York Times Become a Games Company?

When your meetings are powered by AI, quality matters. Shor builds video conferencing solutions engineered for collaboration, giving AI the clarity it needs. Shor, built for collaboration. Learn more at shur.com. Is the sunshine putting you in the holiday mood? Virgin Atlantic holidays has the answer. This is your sign to road trip through Nevada like the movies promised. Or order a Virgin Margarita. Extra salt on the rim in Mexico. Or bounce between islands on a long-tail boat in Thailand. The only thing standing between you and this? Booking it. Book in store over the phone or online at Virgin Atlantic holidays. Select routes. Fatis and seas visit virginatlantic.com. At all protected. Okay, I've got a riddle for you. Name 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? Okay, 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. The 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 game playing 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 are artificial. There is luck and uncertainty. There's limited information. There are trade-offs 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 can be a connection, a laboratory, an escape. Almost 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, games. So today, on Freakinomics Radio, the first of what we hope will be a recurring series on the joys, the 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 Freakinomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen 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, and any sport with a ball. Those are my favorite. If my brother said, OK, here's the game. I'm going to throw this baseball at you as hard as I can, and you have to catch it without a glove. I would 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 and that they 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. That is Eric Zimmerman. I'm a game designer and I'm also a professor of game design at the NYU Game Center. That's in Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in New York City. Two games that I remember. 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 and 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, dodge ball, 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 that might have been in fifth grade on the digestive system. 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. And 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 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 is probably Dungeons & 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 player 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 7, which is so the opposite of Dungeons & 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 that game 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 1990s. 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. Zimmerman did not start out in game design. He studied painting at the University of Pennsylvania. My teachers in art school were what I would call high modernists. So they were really all about the 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, I would 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 80s, early 90s, the AIDS crisis was going on, conceptual art, political art was the rage. I was looking at artists like Barbara Krueger, Jenny Holzer, feminist artists, artists that were critiquing with media, the guerrilla 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 to all of this? Because as a game designer, today, I 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, then later as a writer working with Katie Salander, 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, OK, what would be the line, color and composition of games? If we were going to 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 form in which I'm working. Zimmerman's book Rules of Play is now considered a defining textbook of game design. So what 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, but 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 cards. 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 the spaces of possibility where players will do unpredictable things. You never know what's going to work, what's not going to work, what's going to be confusing, what's going to be engaging. What's your definition of a game? What 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 going to 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. But 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 and the way that I teach game design has to do with that games create meaning for players. If you have a chessboard on your coffee table, it can mean a lot of things. It can mean, hey, look at me. I'm an intellectual person. I have a chessboard at home or maybe it's a Simpsons chess set. So it means, oh, I'm an ironic cartoon aficionado. But if you and I sit down to play the game, then suddenly there's a whole new lattice work of meanings that 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 Shakespeare. It's just the structural rules of grammar. What people do with them is where the play happens. OK, so 10 or 12 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 21st century is a ludic century? That piece is about looking at what happened to 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 darkened theater where you have this immersive experience with the screen and it's very linear and enclosed. Then at the end of the 20th century, something happened with 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 in 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 20th century was, let's say, an encyclopedia set, which were these experts publishing data and facts that were then collected into the static package that then you could buy and own, Wikipedia is the model for the encyclopedia in the 21st 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 have always been about systems of information. In other words, a chessboard is a rule-based state machine of inputs and outputs. 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 the system? The point of the ludic century 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 are 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 happened to work years ago. The Times is, of course, primarily a news-gathering organization, but in recent years it has fully embraced games and games are transforming the Times's 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 20 years ago. As an institution, the New York Times is a very long-standing 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 game players and the integration of smart, interesting language and culture-based games into their readership. Their 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. OK, 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 Hardiman 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 2006, 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? And I said, I got to figure out how to sell sponsorships for the Freakonomics blog. I have made it. OK, so first of all, thank you for selling ads on the blog way back then. I have read, Alex, that you had your site 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, but 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 a 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 150 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 the Times' legendarily successful and great news institution for many years, EBS and flows like anything does. But 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. It feels to me from the outside, 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. 10 to 11 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. We were playing to 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, etc., etc. Can you just talk about how that monopoly had come under assault? This is a story that many in the journalism industry were facing. When you started with classifies and Craigslist came out and really disrupted the entire classifieds business. Then we saw the advent of WebTutoro 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 50 to 100 million people on our various apps and websites. We've basically figured out how to build a durable business that is growing sustainably every year. It didn't happen by accident in 2015. We decided that we were going to 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. My sense is that by 2015, 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. What was the sentiment in the building at that time? We launched our digital subscription model actually a little earlier in 2011. We came in with a lot of conviction to say that over the next 10, 20, 30 years, we believe that we are going to help make a market for 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 that's 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 a solar system analogy. News is the sun and it really gives light and permission for us to then play in 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 Freakin'omics Radio and I'm Stephen Dubner. This weather's given you ideas, isn't it? Virgin Atlantic holidays has got you. This is your sign to step off your pair into the bluest of blue water in the Maldives or eat a bagel the size of your face in New York or dive into a cenote and explore ancient worlds in Mexico. Lock in your holiday with a £75 per person deposit, book in store over the phone or online at Virgin Atlantic holidays. Select Roots. For teases and sees visit virginatlantic.com. Atle Protected. The people of Britain love their fancy blenders. They've bought loads of them and luckily if they bought them with Barclay Card they earned rewards. In fact they'll earn rewards on all their eligible purchases. It's a more convenient way to consume your fruit and veg. What you buy is your business. Giving you rewards on purchases is ours. Barclay Card. Back in your future. 28.9% APR representative variable subject to application, financial circumstances and borrowing history, teases and sees apply. Thank you all so much for being here at our wedding. I can't believe I get to spend the rest of my life with a woman of my dreams. Speaking of dreams, have you ever dreamed of tasting all the colours of the rainbow because that is exactly what you get with Skittles? Five bold fruit flavours in every pack. Lemon, orange, lime, strawberry and blackcurrant. They're chewy, they're colourful, they're perfect. Just like my wife. So thank you for coming and remember to buy Skittles. Shamelessly promote the rainbow. Taste the rainbow. The New York Times before it was pro game was anti game. Its rival newspaper, The New York World, published the first modern crossword puzzle in 1913. The world was essentially a tabloid, whereas The Times was the paper of record. It also became known as the Gray Lady. The Times' slogan was all the news that's fit to print. The implication being that The Times found many things unfit, including crossword puzzles. In 1924, The Times published an editorial about what it called the craze over crossword puzzles. Here's a passage from that piece. What a difference a century makes. We have tens of millions of people who come to our games every single day. That again is New York Times Chief Product Officer Alex Hardiman. Just last year, I was looking this up before because I wanted to kind of understand how many times our puzzles were played. 11.2 billion times. That includes their now iconic crossword puzzle. We launched the crossword, our very first game, in February of 1942. We felt that the psyche of the country needed a reprieve 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 crossword puzzle that would offer challenge and wit and cultural context still inside the news report. And even though we didn't have the language of time well spent, that was really at the crux of it. I think it was 11 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor that Lester Markle, who was the Sunday editor at the Times, sent a memo to the papers publisher Arthur Salzburger. 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 blackout 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's 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 Hardiman with a fairly obnoxious question. If tomorrow the New York Times stopped reporting on, let's say, the Iran War and 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 Whirtle were taken away that your barricades would be stormed and your building might be graffitied or worse. Tell me where I'm wrong there. I hate 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, but 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 going to 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 2022, 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 13 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 Whirtle 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 reporting from our science desk and that helps bring people into the New York Times portfolio. But without any gotchas, without any gimmicks, with 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 you're 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, I mean, part of what makes for a successful game is not just the what, it's the how. Years ago, when I really credit Jonathan Knight for bringing this type of approach into the company, we created almost like a new games R&D lab. This lab is really meant with nurturing creativity and new game ideas. A new game idea can come from anywhere, inside or outside of the games team event. 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 as the other games that we were pursuing. We tried twice. People were 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 with Digits. And that is Jonathan Knight, whom Alex Hardiman just mentioned. I'm the SVP and general manager for New York Times Games. Knight came to the Times not via journalism, but via gaming. I was a general manager at Zynga 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 Zynga. I've done a lot of things in my career, worked on 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 submarine battler. It took the whole dining room table in 12 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 are you doing on your phone right now? Well, I'm doing the Whirtle, but that's not a game. Whirtle most definitely is a game, a 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's gaming success, but the Times did not invent Whirtle. Whirtle was created by a guy named Josh Whirtle. He was an engineer who had been at Reddit. This was actually Josh's second attempt at Whirtle. He'd written it, he'd put it down, he'd come back to it. The New York Times has made a lot of acquisitions over the years. Some of them famously bad. There was About.com, which ended in a $200 million write down. The Times paid more than a billion dollars for the Boston Globe, and ultimately sold it for just $70 million. Whirtle has gone a long way toward making up for those failures. Here's the story of how the Times got Whirtle from Josh Whirtle. He had built it for friends and family, and it started to gain momentum really in 2021. 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. 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 3rd of 2022. 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, are you guys looking at Whirtle? 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. We just started talking. We announced on January 31st to the world that we had acquired Whirtle. It was really thrilling. The Times won't divulge what it paid for Whirtle, but it was reported to be in the low seven figures, and how many new users did Whirtle bring to the Times? We never disclosed that number, but we're talking tens of millions. 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 spending all day every day looking after Whirtle. We were really interested in being good stewards of Whirtle. 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 Whirtle is being developed as a TV show to air on NBC in prime time. The Times itself will co-produce. So what did Whirtle do for the Times' bigger games strategy? Games, even without Whirtle, 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 Whirtle 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 Elphin. Oh, you know what? You've just spoiled the Whirtle for me. I actually haven't done it today. I was thinking of yesterday. Sorry about that. Oh, that's fine. It's another Whirtle 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 going to come back to it tomorrow? Are you going to 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, the D1, the D7, the D30, a number of other metrics, but 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? 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 their feedback will be gentle and useful? In 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 D1, D7, and D30. Metrics, explain, please. Day one retention, day seven retention, day 30 retention. This is kind of the magic metric that 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 with the puzzle. I won't get into what that puzzle was. Can you give me a sense of the nature of it? Well, it'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'd want 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. Then Wordle, which is our biggest game, has a very high solve rate. Over 90% 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 Wordle clones. For our puzzles, we put so much care, even with Wordle, which is a very simple game, even how we started this conversation. You are not happy with the Wordle today. There is that sense of like, that was a good Wordle. That wasn't a good Wordle. That word's Wordle. Well, what does it mean to be Wordle? Well, I don't know. I 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 in 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. But these conversations are what it's all about. 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, with 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. Because it's the New York Times, if you beat a New York Times puzzle, you're not just beating any human. You're beating a New York Times human, which gives you a sort of satisfaction, 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 Fareed Zakaria back on the show soon, and I'd love to know what you want to know. Send an email to radio at freekonomics.com, subject line Fareed. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. When your meetings are powered by AI, quality matters. Shore builds video conferencing solutions engineered for collaboration, giving AI the clarity it needs. Shore, built for collaboration. Learn more at shure.com.com. Is the sunshine putting you in the holiday mood? Virgin Atlantic holidays has the answer. This is your sign. To step off your pair into the bluest of blue water in the Maldives. Need to bagel the size of your face in New York. Or dive into a cenote and explore ancient worlds in Mexico. Lock in your holiday with a £75 per person deposit, book in store over the phone or online at Virgin Atlantic holidays. Select routes for teases and seas visit virginatlantic.com. At or protected. Thank you all so much for being here at our wedding. I can't believe I get to spend the rest of my life with the woman of my dreams. Speaking of dreams, have you ever dreamed of tasting all the colours of the rainbow because that is exactly what you get with Skittles? Five bold fruit flavours in every pack. Lemon, orange, lime, strawberry and blackcurrant. They're chewy, they're colourful, they're perfect. Just like my wife. So thank you for coming and remember to buy Skittles. Shamelessly promote the rainbow. Taste the rainbow. With 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. That 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 20 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 rejected 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 2012, when Facebook went public, 12% of their revenues came from Zynga games. Industry analysts heralded this ecosystem as the undisputed future of the internet, right up 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 Zynga now of the New York Times, to talk about the durability of gaming. I 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 popularity 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. It's clear that Whirtle was a viral phenomenon, but we're seeing incredible resilience even from Whirtle. And 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 churned 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, etc? 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, that you have agency as a user. Some people like to wake up first thing in the morning and do Whirtle 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's office or picking up 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. If you break your streak, you break your streak. We're not in the business of allowing you to pay money to keep your streak 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. They care about how many times they've gotten Whirtle in three. They care about getting purple first and connections. I'm coming up on 100 purple firsts myself and I'm excited about that badge. Congratulations. Crossplay is a pretty new game and it's your first multi-player 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. 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 ripoff, but Crossplay is essentially scrabble with some slight differences. I would say that Crossplay 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 in the 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 Crossbot. When you're done with a game of Crossplay, 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 help you actually improve and get better at this game because if you're better at it, you're going to feel better about it. This gets us deeper into why we play games. Yes, there is an entertainment value, but how about a social value? For this, I went back to Eric Zimmerman. I feel that one strong component of games is that you agree with your opponents or teammates that these are the rules we're going to play by them. If we win, we win. If we lose, we lose. Either way, we shake hands and we leave it there. To me, that sounds like a pro-social value set. I wouldn't want to saddle games by saying they're only successful if they have some positive impact on society. But it's not something that we ask of a symphony orchestra where we say, okay, what are the downstream effects to everyone sitting in the theater? Listening to music, playing music, composing music is part of the pantheon of valuable human activities and there's an intrinsic value in it. I would put games in that pantheon. Do games have impacts? Of course they do, in terms of enriching our lives, in creating social situations where you're kind of meeting people, exploring aspects of your identity. There's lots of ways that we can talk about values of games. I definitely see designing the human experience and social experience as being absolutely central to understanding games. There's a lot of responsibility that comes when you're designing a game. In a lot of mobile games today, the industry wisdom is that you are trying to get players to stay on your game as long as possible and trick them into giving you lots of money. There's a lot of ethical issues and dark design patterns that were really pioneered in games. As much as games can be context for pro-social and really incredibly positive human experiences, they also can be the opposite. It's like anything. The idea of game, it's as basic as story or image or song. It's an essential form of human expression. They can be advertising, they can be pornography, they can be exploitative, or they can be inspiring and beautiful, sometimes all at the same time. Hearing that explanation, Eric, I would think that you are hugely in favor of what's typically called gamification, but I gather that you're actually not in favor of that. Can you tell me why? I'm the loyal opposition to gamification. I'll put it that way. Maybe we start by defining terms. How would you define gamification? My notion of gamification is that it pulls a lot from things like frequent flyer mileage programs, where it's taking things from games and applying them in order to try and get behavioral change, things like levels and points and achievements. There's nothing wrong with that. There's lovely examples of very positive behavior change through design, thinking of the whole nudge way of thinking about the world. The problem with gamification for me is that it strip minds the surface of games, these elements like points and levels and achievements, but it leaves the soul of play behind, the creative problem solving, the productive conflict. I think you compared it to reducing food and cuisine to just nutrition. Those inputs are not valuable, but they're not the reason to do the thing. Every design implies a model of what it means to be human. For example, I'm sitting in a chair, you're sitting in a chair. Who is this chair for? There's the anatomical aspect. Is it for children? Is it for adults? Is it for someone that needs special assistance? What are the materials? Is this chair designed to be quickly used and thrown out? Is it designed to last for a long time? Does this chair make you feel like royalty because it's like a throne or is it something that's meant to be institutional and very functional looking? It's as if every design theorizes about who we are and what people are. I love that about design. To me, the values of design and games are embedded in these very deep ways about how we think about our players and what we're encouraging from them. The tricky thing is that it's not just these nabby-pamby, oh, games should make you empathetic and make you feel good and have good feelings. No, no, no, no. The furious contention of games can be a beautiful thing and the anguish and pain of striving and winning and losing and all of that is beautiful. That again was Eric Zimmerman. We also heard from Jonathan Knight and Alex Hardiman from The New York Times. I would love to know which games you find beautiful and why. Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com. We will have more episodes on games in the coming weeks or months. In the meantime, there's a wedding this weekend between two people named Stacey and Joshua. Joshua wrote in to say that Stacey is a huge fan of Freakonomics Radio and it would be a really nice surprise if we could send our best wishes. Stacey, best wishes for great wedding and a great life. We will be back next week. Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Theo Jacobs. It was edited by Ellen Frankman and mixed by Jake Loomis with help from Jeremy Johnston. Special thanks to Amy Servini for lending her voice to that 1924 Times editorial. The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboulajie, Eleanor Osborn, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Ellaria Montenacourt, Mandy Gorinstein, Peter Madden and Zak Lepinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening. Today's word, laden, l-a-d-e-n. I mean, come on. Can I just complain to you? You can, but you also ruined it for me. I haven't played yet. Oh, sh**. I'm so sorry. The Freakonomics Radio network, the hidden side of everything. This weather's given you ideas, isn't it? Virgin Atlantic holidays has got you. This is your sign to duck into a basement jazz bar in New York or rain forest trek to hidden waterfalls in the Caribbean or high-five a superhero before breakfast in Florida. The only thing standing between you and this? Booking it. Book in store over the phone or online at Virgin Atlantic holidays. Select routes. For T's and C's visit virginatlantic.com. At all protected.