Bringing Professionals Together with Games

Games, knowledge, and news have always gone together — the first “word-cross," as it was then called, debuted 111 years ago in the New York World — and it’s no wonder. All involve stretching your mind, but in complementary ways. You learn, you solve, and the back-and-forth builds on itself.

A century later, these still go hand in hand, but with new ways to connect and engage with others in the process. You share your knowledge and get knowledge back, you share your experiences and hear about others’ own roads. And with games, you finish a puzzle and then talk about it with colleagues, friends, and distant connections.

We’ve been watching and learning ourselves. Our goal at LinkedIn is to continue to find ways to bring professionals together to stay informed and connected. That's why starting today, we're weaving thinking-oriented games directly into the LinkedIn experience. We want to give people a way to exercise their brains while taking a quick break, but also give people a reason to connect with others. We hope that these games spark banter, conversations, and even a healthy bit of competition among professionals around the world. 

We are starting with 3 games — Crossclimb, Pinpoint, and Queens — all brought to you by LinkedIn News. You can find the games in the News module on your LinkedIn homepage, the MyNetwork tab or tap one of these links to go directly to each game: Pinpoint, Crossclimb or Queens. You’ll be able to play each game once a day, see other connections who have played that day and engage in some friendly rivalry with leaderboards. Our News team will kick off a daily conversation to bring people together to talk about the games — and share weekly stats and gameplay banter in a new newsletter from Games Editor Paolo Pasco (recent winner of the Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament! Congrats Paolo!) on our LinkedIn News page. 

As member Melissa Bannon said in a recent comment, “Games are such a great tool to exercise your mind, and an even better tool to create bonds with family, friends, co-workers by engaging in healthy competition, better understanding thought process/personality and fostering collaboration."

Couldn’t agree more. Go check out the games. And if you do better than my personal best score on Crossclimb (0:40), please don’t share it with me yet. As much as I want to collaborate, I’m enjoying feeling like a mini Paolo.

Finally, would highly recommend Lakshman Somasundaram's deeper dive into how each game works and why we designed them the way we did. Check out his article here.

Game on!