NYT Games' Virality, AI, and the Future

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How do you think about uh like virality or wrath refer a friend? Uh I imagine there's so much in especially like you just gave the Wordle example of all these celebrity women who are playing Wordle together, you know, peacocking about how well they do or how much Carol Burnett cheats. How do you think about virality features?
So all of our games have a share like Wordle I Wordle was very successful. We measure the share rate like how many people are sharing on any given day. The thing we think was so great about the Wordle share is it tells this little story, right? Like oh I I I did really well that first letter guess I got four out of the five letters and then I just completely screwed up in every letter after that I I every word after that I just continued continued to not guess the word, right? That's a story. And so then you can share it and it's something fun to share. Connections is a similar thing, you know, I

I am trying to get this guess right or I got purple first and that was really exciting it's the hardest category. So I want to show off that I got that first or I try to get something right I just failed failed failed and finally got it and then I got revealed for a fake afterwards. You know, there's a story that you tell a stranger the same way. And so we found that the games that have a story are kind of in their share it's like a little bit more shareable and and interesting. With cross play, you know, you it's it's more fun with your friends. And so
[clears throat]
uh we we are just kind of finding ways to remind players to to play with their friends to invite their friends but not in a super super in your face way just in a respectful clean UI uh type of way. It's like yeah, wouldn't this be more fun if you were playing with someone you knew?
Oh I I mean again work having worked on Scrabble and I didn't work on Words With Friends when you were also at Zynga during the Words With Friends, you know, kind of like up-and-coming craze is the

you know, there are so many of my friends. I actually really suck at scr- I feel like I'm Scrabble dyslexic. Like I look at those tiles and I'm like, I just don't even understand how to make a word. But I understand so many of my friends have like like their streak of their connection playing this game with their friend is something it's almost like a Duolingo streak, right? Like they they would hate to break it. Ha ha Break it. Have you thought about streaks at all? Do you have streaks? Is part of your gameplay?
Um I think we had something on that. You can look at your opponent and see how many like games that you played. I don't think we have I don't know if we have it as set up as a streak. I'd have to double-check. But we do want to make it easy for you to like find that person. I do it with my dad. I've been playing my dad in you know, Crossplay since over a year now because we he was in the friends and family beta. Um and I think that that's so so

important. So we we have a lot of ideas like that we're adding to Crossplay now. And streaks was I think on on the list but not necessarily in the game yet.
Okay, very good. That was my my free advice for you just having this having seen it be such a you know, a huge thing. And the the other thing that I you know, I I I worked on all the Hasbro games at EA and we you know, we're the first to kind of bring it from you know, all of the consoles to mobile and then Crossplay Facebook to and you know, a lot of people don't realize that the first cross-platform game was Scrabble and we did it. We brought it from Face- you could play Facebook to iPhone and Android. And you know, they're like, "Oh, that doesn't count." I'm like, "Well, it counts. That was cross-platform." But I think the thing that I I realized back then is that gameplay can actually bring friends and families together when you're not in the same room. And so it allows you, I don't know if you and your dad live in the same place or not, but even if you didn't, it it allows you to have that connection that you wouldn't, you know,

otherwise have. And I think, I don't know, I feel like that's another benefit that you provide is this like unique connection and emotional connection. Have you found, you know, do you get like stories like that from people writing in and saying, "Oh my god, like I
All the time. All the time.
We get so many people writing in talking about, um, yeah, just how they play with their parents and and their kids. Or their, yeah, their older kids. Um, yeah, I my own personal other anecdote is that my rabbi from when I was growing up found me some cup. I don't know how he found me. I think he must have been, I don't know. I don't know how. Um, but he found me and now I'm playing as my rabbi.
Oh my god, that's amazing.
He's so good. Like multiple [laughter] seven-letter words in like one game. He's so good.
Oh, that's so funny. All right, I wanted to, you know, go from like connections to the world of technology and AI and,

you know, we live in this world where everyone in the industry is like, "Oh, how do you how do you incorporate AI?" And so, I think of AI in two ways. It's like front of house and back of house, almost like a a restaurant. Front of house being like AI is using it to actually make gameplay. And then back of house is like all the systems and services and, you know, even like, you know, marketing that you need to kind of run things. Um, you know, where does AI sit with how you think about games for New York Times?
Yeah, first and foremost, our puzzles are human-made. We have actual humans that design all the puzzles every day. Um, and that's so important to us and and I think to our brand, you know, it matters that that Will Shortz has been the editor of the crossword for 30 years. Like, you want to go solve a puzzle that he's had a hand in editing. I don't think everybody realizes this, but we get hundreds of crossword puzzle submissions every week. And we pick seven to do it. My favorite meeting at the times is the maybe's review where they

go through that the like we may use them we may might publish this puzzle and they look at the fill and they look and then we say is this is this interesting? Is this something that that feels good? Is it a Tuesday? Is it a Thursday? Like like they we spend so much time on like making these puzzles so interesting. I think that's you see that in the quality and and and New York Times crossword puzzle is really really special. And even Wordle. Tracy our Wordle editor she she's added new words to the Wordle list. She thinks about the cadence. So you don't want to have like three really hard Wordle words all in a row. You you want to really have a thought about the cadence of of the puzzle. Especially like what if you were like two minute had double Z's in a row? Like that would be no fun. So she's thinking about it. And the curated list of what word can be Wordle answers is really important. Having having that is really important. People like to argue with Sam Ezersky our Spelling Bee editor

because like not every possible word is an answer in Spelling Bee. Like only more common words. And so doctors will write in and say why isn't this obscure medical term a word in Spelling Bee? And they write into us and they really care about it. So it's being human made is so important to the puzzles that we make. But for code, you know, if we have a way to do end-to-end faster, like we're going to investigate doing that or better. Like we want we want to have that. Um our customer service agents right now, we can like summarize the um various touchpoints we've had over the past 7 days and tell us if there's a trend. Like that's so useful. If AI can do that for us and and have alerts that not don't just say like, "Hey, this you know, we're getting a lot of pings about the crossword in the past 7 days." But actually tell us what the issue is and pull together a bunch of different tickets that have the data

that we need to maybe solve it. Like those things just that's so useful. So, we're definitely all for I guess what you would call the the back of house type of AI usage. Um we're exploring using it for maybe like prototyping new games to like again keep the costs lower.
Yeah. Yeah, like vibe coding-ish or code like code using the code functionality.
Yeah, like um I think one thing that we've been able to do with something like Figma make is so we'll have a a concept and then we can have our designer kind of put it together in Figma make and we could kind of play it really quickly. But it's it wouldn't say it's a full game. It's just like, "Let's just see how this feels." We did last year for our game jam. It was the first time we were able to kind of say, "Oh yeah, we can use AI for the game jam and you can put together a prototype. You don't need an engineer on your team. You can just like put this In the past we had said engineers, you know, help me prototypes. But I don't know if it worked.

I think actually, in our game jam we had fewer ideas get through the process, like way fewer than we'd had previously. And I think people spent too much time working on the prototypes and not enough time kind of refining the concept and talking about what works and what doesn't work and and really talking through it with the other people on their team. So, like that again even that human connection for figuring out what's a fun game is really important. So, I think this year I'm going to I'm going to like time box AI
Yeah. AI.
No, I think that's a really interesting insight that help that should help a lot of people is just because you can doesn't mean you should use AI for prototyping is like don't forget the hard work. And I don't think any of us want to read the said me page DDD about the concept, but it you know, where I think a lot of people don't realize the hard work is is thinking through how would this actually work. I I do think you mean even back in the

day, I mean, I remember playing paper prototypes, you know, for many you know, like many of my co-workers would do, you know, we would get the paper out. We would do it in the toy industry. We used to like make models and like test the functionality cuz there is something to be able to say for okay, now that somebody's thought through it and how do I interact with it? I I do think it's great to hear that you're not completely dismissing AI and I think we live in a world where in many cases we live on the extremes of everything. It's like AI is evil. No, AI is great. And it sounds like you're somewhere in the middle where you know, from from the content and the heart and the soul that's that's human made, but from like hey, you know, the kind of like the back house to my cooking analogy or my restaurant analogy like that's totally okay with you guys.
Yeah, it's it it's if we can make it easier for the editors to to edit it or whatever, but we just it really is very important that it stays yeah, that it stays human made that the puzzles stay human made. It's

I feel it's more fun if you know that you're solving a puzzle that a human worked on. More fun, right? I don't know, it feels better.
It is a good feeling to know that it's like a curation. It's a you know, artisanal experience. I think you're right that what people come to the New York Times for is a certain quality bar and an expectation as a marketer again with branding like you have to live up to a certain brand expectation that people have when when come to you for experience, especially if it's subscription, and a sense they're, you know, they're they're paying to be let into this experience. They want to know that it's at a quality they expect and it's always going to be there. I think I even read that you, you know, as you are thinking about one of the the razors of making a decision of what makes it is like, is this going to last for the the next 175 years?
Yeah. Mhm. Yeah, totally. When we add a game to the portfolio, we want it to feel

human-crafted. We want it to feel accessible and social and like it's time well spent. And it has to be all those things because we want it to be in our portfolio for a really long time.
Mhm.
[clears throat]
So, what's next for you guys? Any any new games testing in Canada we should know about?
Nothing is live in Canada right now. Uh we have a few games or a couple games that we're working on and I don't know if they're going to make it all the way and I don't I don't like to talk about it but if they're, you know, going to make it all the way. They're in our like prototype phase both of them right now. So, uh hopefully one of them or both of them make it. They're different, they're fun, but yeah, I'm I'm we're always trying to find other games other games as well. So, we have other concepts. Next week we're voting on another concept, so we are always voting on new things too.
Crazy questions. Would you ever consider outside submissions or is it only internal?
Wouldn't it be great to buy the next Wordle? Wouldn't that be wonderful? So, if there's a another game that is

the next Wordle, I think we would we would be totally open to buying it. I I we wouldn't We have this internal process, so we haven't ever like gone to another studio and said, "Hey, just sign develop design and develop a game for us." But if there was a game that existed that was really cool, I think we would look at it.
[clears throat]
So, no second party opportunities, but maybe uh a third-party purchase.
Do you have the next Wordle? Come talk to me. Yeah.
Well, so just asking for a friend, do you do any licensing or do would you ever like license a brand that would maybe be a fit or is everything has to be kind of like a homegrown no IP?
I don't I don't know the specifics. I guess you would want to talk and see what the specifics were and and see how it could work out.
Okay, no, fair enough. Fair enough. Just asking for a friend. I'll I'll I'll I'll keep you on after and tell you what it is.
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Okay.
Everyone is suspense. Uh well, Zoe, did anything else before I let you go? This has been awesome to

like, you know, peek behind the curtain of how you actually make games for the New York Times, both of the different apps that you have. What did I forget to ask you? Are you hiring? I mean, that's the other big question that people want to know. Where do they Where do folks go if you have any openings?
hiring a few engineering positions right now in in New York City if anybody wants to. But the thing is they got to be uh Android or iOS or web. So, not we're not in Unity. Yeah.
Oh, that's right. Oh, you're not in Unity. Do you use your own proprietary engine?
Um yeah, I mean, we we kind of use shared tech with the rest of the company and then um we we built everything ourselves. Yeah.
Okay, got it. Oh, that's that's interesting to note. Well, Zoe, thank you so much for coming on Deconstructor of Fun and uh see you next time.
Great. Thank you.
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