It’s Friday night in the club, and I’m on LinkedIn again. While all the cool kids in the crowd around me are grooving to the bouncy techno beats, I’m just fiddling with my phone.
I swipe open the work-focused social network, scroll through a sea of notifications that indicate which of my connections found which brand’s turgid post “insightful,” and finally spot what I’m looking for: Queens. It’s one of the little daily logic games available on LinkedIn. Today’s unique puzzle will reset at midnight, and if I don’t complete it by then, I’ll mess up my current streak of playing this game for nearly 100 days in a row. It is 11:56 pm and the band just launched into one of my favorite songs. But I’m locked in, tapping the Queens on my screen.
With all of the anxiety-inducing social services installed on my phone, I never expected stodgy old LinkedIn to be the one to give me FOMO. I’d never spent all that much time on the relatively anodyne site—even when job hunting—but one year ago today, LinkedIn introduced games to its platform, and I have never left.
The puzzles manifest in the form of simple brain teasers, some of them word-based, some of them logic-oriented. LinkedIn Games started with three puzzles—the chess-like Queens, the phrase guesser Pinpoint, and the Wordle-lite Crossclimb. Since then, it has slowly added additional puzzles, including the grid harmonizer Tango and, most recently, the swipey maze game Zip.
“It's a breather for me,” says Peter Rubin, head of publishing at Automattic and a former WIRED contributing editor who is also a self-described giant puzzle nerd. “They’re the perfect sort of bite-size things. I don't think about them before. I don't think about them after. That's it.”
