The Secret Behind Your NYT Games Addiction

(upbeat music) - Good morning, Brood Daily Show, I'm Neil Fryman. - And I'm Toby Howell. - Today, what's behind your New York Times games addiction? - We talked to the guy in charge of it all to find out the secret sauce. It's Monday, September 7th, let's ride. (upbeat music) - Happy Labor Day, everyone, with the office close today. We are bringing you a special holiday interview episode. So if you're anything like us, your morning group chats have changed from actual conversation to a sea of green, yellow, and gray squares, a wordle, connections, the many. Spelling B, doing New York Times puzzles has turned into a daily ritual for millions of people. - So how did that happen? And maybe more importantly, what makes a game a New York Times game? To find out, we spoke to Jonathan Knight, the head of games at The New York Times. He spent his career obsessed with games, including stops at EA in Zingha. Before taking over a portfolio, that now includes some of the most recognizable brain busters on the internet. - We talked about the puzzle revolution, how the times decides which games make the cut and the story behind acquiring a wordle. But before we get to the interview, a quick word from our sponsor Hotels.com. - How was your last business trip, Neil? - Bad, I had to stay in a yurt with 14 other dudes. - Sounds like you could use business preferences from Hotels.com. - It helps travelers find the right hotel faster by remembering their go-to-work trip requirements. - Travelers set their preferences once, including fully refundable stays, Wi-Fi, breakfast, gym access, and more, then future business trip searches, automatically surface matching Hotels. - That way you can book work trips faster, just set your preferences once and get results tailored to your business travel needs. Plus, get up to 20% off select hotels, instantly with member discounts and earn rewards for future travel. Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every work stay at Hotels.com/morningbrew. That's Hotels.com/morningbrew. Loyalty members, 18 plus. - Now, here's our conversation with New York Times, head of games, Jonathan Knight. - Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us and sorry to interrupt your wordle playing. - That's all right, I'll get back to it. Thank you, good to be here. - All right, so I have currently about seven different group chats where people send their daily puzzle scores across a bunch of different games. Those did not exist five years ago, those group chats. Why seemingly all of a sudden is everyone so into puzzles? - Well, yeah, it's a great question. I think we've obviously, at the New York Times, been in the puzzle business for a very long time, so it doesn't seem like all of a sudden to us when you kind of zoom out for the historical perspective. We ran our first crossword puzzle in 1942 and it's a great story because it was shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the paper felt, hey, let's give people something to kind of take their mind off of a rough news cycle and thus the Sunday crossword was born and so we've been publishing puzzles for a very long time. I do think that with the acquisition of wordle, which came in 2022, it was a moment and it was COVID, it was sort of back half of COVID and people were exhausted and divided and along comes this just adorable game that kind of brings everybody together and it had a very clever sort of sharing mechanic that people started to use in their group chats and then yeah, they form these little micro social networks with family and friends and because the game's so good, people come back to it every day and because it's a social moment, then it kind of keeps it going as well. So yeah, we're like thrilled. It's been kind of an incredible phenomenon. But it can't just be COVID. I mean, we can go outside now and people are still playing games. So I don't know exactly what it is. There has maybe COVID was an inflection point for a variety of games and maybe wordle was the catalyst but there's something super sticky about these games. Now in 2026 when you can also hang out with your friends and do a bunch of other things besides playing games that it's had such remarkable staying power and expanded into a lot of different types of puzzles. Yeah, that's totally right. I think yeah, catalyst is a good word, right? So we've been at this for a long time but the crosswords, you know, are not for everyone. They can be as we were just discussing before we started. They can be hard. They can take a long time. You can get better at them but it is a little bit of an investment and we're really proud of our crossword offering but I think wordle did sort of, you know, blow the doors open on that sort of daily puzzle phenomenon and brought it to tens of millions of people but I would say the core concept is the same which is it's a daily puzzle. It's made by real people at the New York Times and that really matters. It's the same puzzle every day for all of us. So we're all trying to kind of solve that same whether it's like the wordle of the day or it's that Sunday crossword we can say, hey, did you do the Sunday today? Oh yeah, it was really hard or hey, did you get wordle today? Oh, I got it into and it's a shared experience and it sounds simple but most games don't work that way. You know, we might be playing Candy Crush Saga together. You might be on level 9,622 and I might be on level 360. You know, we're having a kind of shared experience we both love the product but our daily experiences are very different. But for us the content is the same for everyone whether you started wordle yesterday or you've been playing for five years. So that I think also just makes it a shared experience. You know, I also happen to think that our product is very elegant, high quality. It's, you know, we are respectful of users and respectful of their time. The game isn't nagging you, it's not shouting at you, it's classy. And because of that, I think people are more proud to talk about their habit with us and to share with others and we see even celebrities sharing their stories about playing our games and that's because they're proud of it, they identify with it. So I think we're doing a lot of things right. So you obviously have a lot of very successful games under the New York Times umbrella. But some games have failed to take off on thinking specifically like digits. What have you observed or what have you noticed on what makes a game successful versus what makes a game less successful? Yeah, great question. And digits is not the only, you know, game that we've tested with users that we decided not to go forward with digits is near and dear to my heart. We really love that puzzle. We try it a couple times. And look, we just have a very high bar. I think when we introduce a new game, we intend to support it for a long time. It requires real humans to make the puzzles every day. And so, you know, any puzzle we add to the portfolio is just, you know, it's a real cost and investment. And we want to, you know, do it well. So we're very thorough about our green light process. And we have lots of concepts that come in. They come in from all over the place. The team is constantly pitching new puzzle ideas. And we run them through a rigorous kind of phase gate process with concept committee, a green light committee, all of that and ultimately test with users. Get feedback, do beta tests, look at retention. And then, you know, we just have a high bar. And if it doesn't make it, we try to make a decision quick to cut it and move on to something else. And that's just part of the process. Are there specific criteria you look for when adding a new game to the portfolio? Like, do you have a checklist that says, it has to be made by a human, it has to do X, Y, and Z. Like, is there, when you look at a new game, do you think to yourself, this is a New York Times game and this is not a New York Times game? Absolutely, we have that conversation. I might describe it as, you know, filters versus a checklist. Like, we have these filters that we put the concepts through and, you know, I would say, like, hey, is it editorially driven? Does it have real humans behind it? Do we feel like the daily content would be fresh and inspiring and clever and all of that, you know, do we think it's going to be a good use of people's time? Like, will it fit into their daily life? You know, does it, do we think people would share it? You know, all of these things go into that kind of aesthetic. And I think also, you know, we're not going to do a racing game or shooter, you know, so there's like, hey, is it, is it a daily solve? You know, puzzles are meant to be solved, games are just played. You know, those kinds of conversations, for sure, happen. You know, the real wants to be sort of get further along and we have something that we can put out as a beta. Then we're really looking at return rates or retention and we're sort of getting just like very rigorous and objective about, you know, are people coming back? Not just the next day or the third day or the seventh day, but are they coming back 30 days later, 60 days later? Is it really habit forming? And that's a very high bar. We look at a lot of things that are clever and like, would you do them two or three times? Absolutely, you know, and it's hard to say no to those things because they just look great and they're fun and you do them a few times. But would you come back a month later every day? It's just a much higher bar. Do you look at it as buckets where you say, we have a lot of really great language games. Let's add in some more great math games or some more visual games because one thing that we're pretty obsessed with right now is geography-based games. I don't know if you've heard of a game called MapTap or you just are tapping a globe. So do you ever look at it in segments like that? It's like, oh, we could probably branch into the geography world. Or is it just, on the merits on if it's a good game or not. - No, 100% we do, and I'm fortunate that we've got a research team, Juliet as our research lead, and they really help us understand categories, segments, opportunity size for these things. Word puzzles are, it's a very big category, sort of sub-category of puzzle game, and so we've been fortunate to kind of have a lead in the word category. You know, the App Store categorizes these things, and so it does matter. You know, and also we wanna have a well-rounded portfolio. So, for example, we introduced Pips not long ago, which is a logic puzzle, and it uses dominoes to you rotate the dominoes, and you place them in a certain pattern to meet certain requirements on the board, and it's a visual logic puzzle, and it doesn't require you to know anything about the English language. And that was intentional. We've got tiles, we've got a Sudoku, so we wanna make sure our logic puzzle offering is robust, and yeah, that leads us to think about other kinds of categories within the overall puzzle genre. One of the most powerful features about Wordal is that little emojis, shareable text that you can send to your family group chats. When you saw that was that in aha moment, that Wordal was doing this, or was that just standard game design, because that, to me, feels like the most powerful shareability aspect, was that like a learning moment for the industry? - It was a totally a learning moment. It was a learning moment for us, and we've followed that model with connections and with strands, and we've had a lot of fun with the emoji share. We'll do things now where like on Halloween, the emoji share has changed for just one day, and there's little pumpkins in there, whatever. So we've internalized that. I consider that to be a feature of the game, and I often talk about those group chats, whether it's in WhatsApp, or whatever messenger app you're using to share that surface. I feel like that's like the other half of our product experience. We don't own that real estate. We're there kind of rent-free, but we really care about what that's like, and we don't want to junk that experience up with a lot of links, or things that would just make it not be the same kind of thing you would expect coming from our actual product. But we have experimented with that, and tried to have fun with it. There's no question that that was something that Wordl uniquely did at a unique moment in time. And I would say, remember, that was also like peak Twitter. Like Twitter was never the same after that sort of era. And I don't know that that could ever happen again. Our social networks have become fragmented, and you'd feel like you were jumping in the shark if you tried to replicate the wordl share. So I do think it was special, and it's interesting. That story, it wasn't even in the original product. It was a user, and somewhere in New Zealand, I think, who wanted to share her wordl experience, and came up with this idea of like, well, let me just share the grid, but without the solution, so that I'm not spoiling it. But it's my little story of how I solved the wordl. And Josh Wardle, the creator of the game, sort of incorporated that early on into the experience. So I would say it was even like a community feature. And so very difficult to kind of replicate, I think, that kind of explosive virality. I do think it's like a once in a generation moment. - I think it's so funny to how sacred it is, because you can edit it. You know, it is literally a text message, you can edit, and yet no one does. There's this aura of untouchability to it, and I love that. I love that collectively. We have, and us, trust in each other, that we respect to the wordl-emoji-sarebility. - Well, have you seen those interviews with Carol Burnett and Julie Louis-Dreyfus, and they're in it in Charlie's Theron. They're all in a group chat together, and they do Wardle every day. But Charlie's Theron and Julie Louis-Dreyfus have begun to accuse Carol Burnett of cheating. And it plays out on the talk shows, it's really funny. It's apparently she's gotten Wardle in one, like seven times, and nobody buys it. - That's not possible. - Yeah, not possible. - Alright, so I think I'm channeling the, maybe the frustrations of a lot of New York Times games players and asking this question, how much do you think about rage bait as a driver of engagement? By that, I mean an obvious missing word in spelling B, and especially obscure answer and wordl, a fiendish category in connections. Because when those happens, that's where you start to see the discussion, and you see these games percolate into social media. Is that a strategy that you guys deploy? - It is intentional from the standpoint of our editors are, well, you listed a lot of puzzles there, and different answers for different puzzles. But the editors are keen on fresh, surprising, fun, sometimes twisted, sometimes challenging, sometimes devious puzzles every day. And that's their job, is to entertain people. And when you solve a New York Times puzzle, you're not just solving any puzzle. You're sort of like, it's this feeling of accomplishment. Like I beat those, you know, those tricksters, you know, in Manhattan, like I'm smarter than them. And that's a feeling that speaks to our brand as well. So absolutely. But I think like, I would say connections, the purple category, intentionally devious, misdirects, that's the nature of that puzzle. And Winnelloo is just a mastermind at that, and she took to it immediately. And it's just very difficult to imagine a different editor doing what she did. I think with word ol' Tracy Bennett is very thoughtful about the sort of cadence of the, you know, the easier ones, the hard ones, the waterfalls, where it's just like, is a tower of green and you can't get, like, she thinks about all of that. And, you know, with Spelling Bee, look Sam Azersky has a lot of fun going online and debating with people, the hive mind about whether that word should or shouldn't have been included. At the end of the day, he's actually not, I think, trying to be devious or frustrating. I think he's trying to create a well-balanced experience where you feel like you can get to genius and that there isn't some word that's so obscure that you would never get it that's sort of keeping you from getting to the rank, but then for another person, that might not be an obscure word. It's like, hey, you know, that's a relatively real word and I knew it and it didn't acknowledge it for me and so I'm frustrated. So that's, you know, it's a balance there and I think he's just always trying to strike that balance. - I love when it does break through into the discourse 'cause the reason one that just happened was Poshach Gate. I don't know if you, this made the way through the company, but PSHAW was the word ol' word. And I just opened Twitter and it felt like, you know, 2022 again, where everyone's like, God dang it, like, word ol', you just ruined my entire morning and it just broke through the discourse again. But I like when that happens 'cause it makes me feel like everyone's collectively, you know, playing in the same arena once more, but Poshach Gate was the most recent one that I can think of. We'll be back with more Jonathan Knight right after this. - Neil, you're late. - I was here before you today. - That might be so, but every day you're late to A.I. you fall two days behind. 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All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. - Meet Amazon Ads Rising Star, Daryl Spencer, who set out to redefine men's self-care with his brand Crown Skin. Amazon Ads helped him grow. - I walked away from Big Tech to build a luxury brand. In a category that no one was paying attention to, with the help of Amazon Ads, I'm reaching relevant audiences and competing with the biggest names and men's grooming. We've scaled to over $500,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown's Skin Story at advertising.amazon.com/rising-stars. - I also think in this line of questioning where it feels like you, the player, versus the New York Times editors, and I have seen your social strategy kind of adopt this where a lot more of your editors are becoming personalities. People know them by name. They're in front of the camera. They're playing the game sometimes or playing against each other. How are you thinking about turning these editors who would normally be behind the scenes into almost front-facing social media personalities? - Yeah, I'm so thrilled that that's happening and they're having so much fun with it. I think it's a little cliche, but more than ever in this day and age where people are maybe struggling to figure out if content is AI-generated or human-generated, we are intentionally leaning into the human-made nature of what we do. We're investing in our editorial team. We're so proud of them, we want to promote them, we're doing more to actually showcase this in the product and you'll see that, you know, coming in the coming months and this is part of our strategy for sure to not only lean into the human nature of our puzzles, but to also let people know and make sure they know that these are really made by very talented creative clever editors and and constructors. Have you ever thought about launching a podcast? We don't have any plans for that. I think we have talked about a lot of different ways in which we could reach audiences through different media. We just announced a collaboration with NBC to bring wordled to television as a game show. I think that's going to be really exciting. I think if we felt that a podcast or other media could, you know, get the word out and help us reach more people, we would pursue it. But right now, I think we've got a lot still to do with the Instagram channel and sort of growing that it's getting a lot of traction. I'm glad you mentioned it. So I think we're focused on keeping our eye on the ball there and the TV show and, you know, we'll see, we'll see what next year brings. Was that volunteering us, Neil? Because I'll do it. It was actually a very innocent question, but since you brought it up, yeah, sure, I'll do the crossword one absolutely. I wondered to about what it feels like to work in the games division at this broader company that is in New York Times that is ostensibly a news business, but over recent years, subscription revenue from games has overtaken the news business in terms of what it contributes to the bottom line of the company. Do you feel any sort of pressure because of that? Does it feel different down that you know that you are a major money maker for this very historic news organization? Yeah, well, quick correction. We have not overtaken the news in terms of revenue. So, you know, the news is still the soul and the heart of the business. It's the most valuable product we have. You know, not just in terms of our mission, which is to seek the truth and help people understand the world and, you know, speak truth to power like all of those things that are so critical to the mission in New York Times are more than ever, just at the heart of the company and, you know, it's also, you know, from business standpoint, just like in terms of revenue, the most valuable product. So, you know, sometimes games gets talked about, you know, as if it is bigger than news or something like that, and it's not. Is it a valuable contributor? Yes, is it the strategy working? Yes, we also have a great cooking product. The athletic is a really powerful sports product, wire cutter product recommendations, all of these kind of lifestyle products that, you know, I think of it as a solar system and the news is our son and these lifestyle products are kind of revolving around it and the whole thing, you know, manifests in the all access bundle, which, you know, if you purchase the bundle, you have access to all of it. It's the most valuable offering we have. And, you know, but we as lifestyle products, we still get our kind of heat and life from that son, the brand of the New York Times, the mission, what it stands for. So, we're playing our part in that and, yeah, I'm really proud that games is a particularly large planet in that solar system. The strategy is working is what that means and, you know, we're, you know, we get up every day, we don't just make games, we contribute to a more important mission and that's like really rewarding. So, people might be interested in your background and you come from more traditional video, mobile game background, words with friends, EA, the Sims. So, my question is, you know, what did you learn from that experience, making the Sims to bring to something like word or what are some of the main similarities and differences in the game mechanics and the overall user experience. And, you know, with games, it's a, it's a tough business and I think the one thing I've been at it a really long time and probably the one thing I've learned is that, you get into trouble when you think you know too much and with every news cycle and every new opportunity, you have to treat it, you know, you have to come at it for what it is and what it's trying to do. And maybe your pattern matching to things you've learned over your career, but it would be a mistake for me to try to apply, you know, some sort of formula or some sort of playbook, you know, from other games experiences. And I think even within the games industry, people who are successful have a kind of humility when they come to the next project that my last project may have been successful or maybe it was a failure. I'm learning all along the way, but if I, you know, think that my past successes are going to mean future successes, sort of just on their own, I'm usually going to get myself into trouble, so that was more my orientation versus, you know, bringing something from the Sims or Farm Bill. Okay, we have a couple of rapid fire questions to finish, but first I want to ask you about some of the word all knockoffs or word all inspired games out there because there are a million at this point, there's fact old, there's hurdle, there's, there's a world, which is world countries, and my personal favorite is Jeff Goldblum, I don't know if you've seen that one, but basically 90% of the time, the answer is Jeff Goldblum, but another 10% of the time, it's just a different 13 letter word. Anyway, what is your policy around these to these circulate, and you know, the, the games division, or do you mostly ignore them? How do you approach these word all knockoffs? Yeah, we look at everything, so we're always looking at those, playing those, playing, you know, puzzles that come out from either competitors or just, you know, developers. And I love seeing all that, because at the end of the day, it keeps word in the conversation is what we find, and this is, it's hard to talk about those games without eventually, or pretty quickly coming back to like, oh, and it was inspired by word, oh, what's that? And so it just keeps us in the conversation, and we're very confident that we've got the original official word, and that ultimately people will find us. You know, look, if someone's trying to deliberately trade on our trademarks or copyrights or things like that and deceive, you know, people into thinking that they're the official world and whatnot, that's a different, you know, matter. But if you're inspired by word, and are doing spin-offs and things like that, I think it ultimately accrues back to us, and, you know, look, maybe one of those will be something we want to pick up one day, so we're always watching the community. Alright, next question. What is your personal word, or starting word? My starting word is stair, st-a-r-e, and I always had that one, and then a couple of years ago, it was the solution, and I got it in one, and it was so thrilling. And, you know, despite what you might think, I don't actually know what the word is going to be every day, so I just play it like everyone else. And I was so happy, but then I thought, "Uh, now that it's been, you know, I don't want to use it anymore, because it's never going to be the one." I think people secretly hope they're going to get portal in one, right? So I pivoted, and I went on a kind of a long walk in the woods after that, changing every few weeks, and couldn't quite find one, and then I don't know if you saw, but we decided to start rerunning some words at the top of this year. So Tracy now has been, you know, sort of opened up to, like, previously run words can be now, you know, part of the solution pool. So I went back to stair, hoping that I'll get it again one day. See, I'll never get portal in one, because my first word is sore, but it's spelled S-O-A-R-E, which is just not really a word that people use, and then I followed up with Clint, which again, you would not think is a word, 'cause I'm vowel- You're optimizing, which I know some people don't think that's the way to play, but I'm glad that you're using a real word that has a chance of being the word in one, because you're right. I think that's the more ethical way to play. And this is correct, the New York Times says that Adu is the most popular starting word, A-D-I-E-U. If you're looking for any inspiration, that's correct. It's the most popular, but it is not the most effective. Oh, Toby says. Sorry, Clint, I was telling you. I watched a YouTube video like four years ago on this. Maybe it's changed since. I have a question. Why are New York Times games so popular in Australia? You might have to ask the Australians. It is true that it's popular. I think we're very popular in large English-speaking countries generally, so we're popular in Canada, UK, Australia. But yeah, I was at a conference in Southeast Asia and some Australians were there and they were going nuts for it, so yeah, you might have to ask them. Maybe I'll just, and they're doing it before us, so that is true. They're not probably actually, it comes out, you know, Eastern time, so they have to wait a little bit, but I would ask them. But yeah, in the list of like most popular cities of, for New York Times games, it's, you know, kind of the major US cities, and then it's like Sydney and Melbourne out of nowhere. Can I pitch you one game as my chance to make it into the New York Times? I wrote down like 10 of these. I'm trying to figure out which one is my. The first one I wrote down was Burtle, which is just for burgers, and it's a new bird call every day, but that doesn't seem like a big enough total addressable market. I like this. Six degrees of cooking. It's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Basically, you have one New York Times recipe, and you have to connect it to another one using only shared ingredients. So you would start at like, catch your wee Pepe, and you have to finish at B. Fallington, and you have to look at the ingredients list and click on each ingredient to make it to the shared connection. It's interesting. You'd have to eliminate salt and pepper. Like there's a lot of, jump right in. There's a lot of ingredients that are the same across so many recipes. I haven't figured out the mechanic chef. You should have worked with me first, but I know. - Why wouldn't you just call that six degrees of Krispy Bacon, though? - Oh, you're gonna work on the title. See, this is why you're the editor and I'm myself. So, okay, we'll talk after this, but I think it's coming to a games app near you. - All right, Jonathan, thanks so much. That is all the time we have. We appreciate you coming on. We learned so much about games and game mechanics and what Toby thinks about in his first hurdle and six degrees of Krispy Bacon. Really appreciate it, I wish you all the continued success for huge fans of your games. - Thank you, thank you so much for inviting me. - I had so many bad ones written down. - Yeah. - I like the things shared. - Well, I think there could be something there. - You're thinking about the corporate synergies, too. - All right, I know. It doesn't quite work, though, 'cause I think what you would need to do is go ingredient, recipe, ingredient. Because you can't just go ingredient, ingredient, ingredient, because however it gets to a recipe. - Right, you will never get to a recipe. Again, I need a little more thought, but yeah. It's based off the Wikipedia game. I don't know if you've ever played that jump. It's, no, what's it called? The Wikipedia game, I used to be like competitive in this, where you just click on hyperlinks to get from one page to the other and you have to trace it through the hyperlinks as quickly as possible. It is so fun. You should play it in your office. Is it called the wiki game? - Yeah, the wiki game. - The wiki game. - And they just give you, yeah, silk road to astronomical object and it's whoever can get it in the least amount of hyperlinks. - Yeah. - And there's a new one every day? - There's a new one every like 20 seconds, honestly. - Oh, it just can continue. - There's an infinite amount of articles, I guess. - Right. Yeah, we used to play this at lunchtime and the big controversy was, can you command F or do you have to just scroll? - Oh. - Because the best page to get to was America, 'cause it's like one of the biggest ones and it hits all sorts of industries and everything. So you try to get to America as quickly as possible, then you branch off from there. It's fun, wiki game. - Oh yeah, this does look kind of addictive and it sort of tracks it. - Right. - There's a leaderboard on the side, so. - Yeah. - Oh, games. Nothing better. - Yeah. - You can go with that. - Cool. - Are we good, Ray?