“All work and no play makes Jack a boring boy” wrote the protagonist of The Shining. LinkedIn listened to him and decided to fix it: starting today, it arrives on the social network for professionals a series of games. You can try your hand at three different puzzle games directly on the mobile app or on your desktop: Pinpoint, Queens e Crossclimb.
LinkedIn focuses on games: not just social work for professionals
We've already been talking about it for some time, but today we found it on our LinkedIn page (after reading about it on The Verge): games have arrived on LinkedIn. You can find them in the News and My Network sections on the desktop version, as well as in the mobile app.
The introduction of games on LinkedIn it seems to be part of a very specific strategy. The social network, owned by Microsoft, does not want to limit itself to a service for finding information on companies and workers. It wants users to make time to play. As Lakshman Somasundaram, director of product at LinkedIn, explains, “It's time to move on in how we deepen and rekindle relationships at workputting fun at the centre”.
Three puzzles for coffee breaks
Credit: LinkedIn
The three games offered by LinkedIn are all puzzle games, but with different mechanics. Pinpoint it's a word association game, in which you have to guess the category (“things that break”, for example) to which five progressively revealed words belong. Crossclimb, instead, combines curiosity and wordplay, challenging the user to create a scale of words: we start with a clue for the first, then the others all have a letter in common with the previous one (“Bread, dog, houses” , for example). In the end, Queens it is a sudoku without numbers, in which you have to place queens on a gridfor each row and column, without touching each other.
But LinkedIn remains a network for professionals. So, each game can be played once a day. And, after the daily session, the user will have access to various parameters such as high score, daily streak, rankings and even who played in their network. A way to stimulate competition and comparison between colleagues and professional contacts.
It's not just LinkedIn that focuses on gaming
LinkedIn is certainly not the first company to focus on games to increase user engagement. Keep people on your platform improve statistics, it allows you to obtain more advertising contracts and, therefore, more income.
Credit: LinkedIn
The New York Times, for example, saw its games played over 8 billion times last year, thanks largely to the phenomenon Wordle, which he purchased two years ago now. And as The Verge points out, game subscriptions have helped the Times grow and retain users over the long term. Netflix continues to expand its offering of smartphone games. Facebook has been integrating games for a long time.
At the moment, LinkedIn doesn't charge for its games: the goal is to keep users on the platform for as long as possible, monetization comes in a different way. Although it remains to be seen whether professionals will appreciate this innovation: with so many games available on smartphone stores, will LinkedIn games be able to prevail? Or will they remain a novelty to be tested only a few times, just to waste some time at work? By the way, we have to try them again: clearly, only for journalistic research purposes.
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