“The solver encounters a path while they’re solving that almost makes it like they’re having a conversation back with me,” the puzzle creator Snyder says. “I’ve left a trail of breadcrumbs in the forest, and now they’ve followed it to find where the cabin is.”
The platform’s dedication to games doesn’t sit quite so well with some LinkedIn users.
Mitchell Tan, who runs a messaging service that he says was born out of hatred for LinkedIn’s inbox, finds the existence of LinkedIn’s games frustrating. He says he uses the platform to find and secure business connections who will then go on to buy services from him. But connecting and talking directly on LinkedIn feels more difficult to navigate than it should be, and to Tan, LinkedIn putting resources into efforts like games ignores people using the platform to make a living.
“​​LinkedIn is where you make money,” Tan says. “There’s a lot of leverage here. These people are not random teenagers on TikTok, they’re VPs of sales who make millions of dollars a year, and they actually read your stuff if it’s good enough. You have really fancy CEOs and VCs posting all day, and so you have access to commercial influence. That’s why we’re here.”
As an example, he takes issue with games like Zip, which the user can play in a desktop browser using the arrow keys on their keyboard. But the arrow keys don’t work to navigate LinkedIn’s inbox, which he feels is a misuse of resources that prioritizes a more frivolous feature over the parts used by LinkedIn’s power users.
“What the heck is this multibillion-dollar company doing?” Tan says. “We are literally making this platform valuable. In the world of people hustling and trying to build their business, the idea of coming to LinkedIn for entertainment is kind of odd.”
Despite asking several times, LinkedIn wouldn’t share any specific numbers about how many people engage in games on the platform, other than to say that 830,000 people have subscribed to its daily Games newsletter and that “84 percent of players return the next day after playing.” Does that mean games are a net boon to LinkedIn’s wider services? Maybe.
“A lot of real life is solving problems that may or may not have an answer,” Snyder says. “A puzzle is a pretty organized thing that should have an answer if you just get about doing it. Puzzles are a small way to get into thinking about life.”
“LinkedIn is one of the few social media outlets that doesn’t feel tainted to the point of unusability,” Rubin says. “Games don’t interrupt it or pollute the play experience with a lot of other things, with pop-ups or trying to pull you to this part of the site. It’s a very easy thing to go into and get out five minutes later.”
“The work day is hard. Job hunting is harder,” says Thomas, the photographer. “So being able to take a break, but also do something you can achieve and finish quickly, is a good reward.”
Richard Liverman is a UK consultant who has built a following off his cheeky blog posts and curated Spotify playlists based around trying to solve LinkedIn’s category-guessing game Pinpoint. As a self-anointed “King of Pinpoint,” Liverman says engaging in a tongue-in-cheek bit based on LinkedIn’s games has led him to connections with upwards of 200 people on the site.
“LinkedIn is getting better, but it can be a little bit stuffy,” Liverman says. “You know what it’s like when you’re networking, you can tell people that are really trying and it’s just almost uncomfortable. So Pinpoint and all the games, I think it’s allowed people to network and communicate in a much more fun way.”
