How does the New York Times make a game?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Full disclosure: I developed this app during Christmas '22 with the idea of offering only one challenging new puzzle/level each day. I believe that the focus on the level of difficulty makes a huge difference.
The 3 great games they have were not built this way. Crosswords obviously are decades old. Spelling Bee was entirely designed by Will Shortz (who mostly copied it from another paper). And Wordle was bought.
Every other game they've made I find almost indescribably unappealing. I love puzzles of all types, but it's hard to even call them puzzles. They are clunky interfaces on top of clunkier concepts which are more exercises in rule-following than puzzles to solve.
I play those three too. Sometimes I attempt Letterboxed. I stopped Sudoku because it's such a time sink, even if solvable. Gone are the days where one could sit with a paper for hours (real or otherwise), to solve puzzles.
> “It’s fairly democratic,” Zoe Bell, the executive producer of New York Times Games, said in an interview. Anyone on the Games team can pitch an idea. It’s a departure from the process at Ms. Bell’s past jobs, where only the game designers were allowed to contribute ideas.
I guess that's the case for big game studios that have established pipelines of new games, but NYT is basically an indie studio with marketing handled by their parent company, and indie studios from what I've seen are very much unstructured and does not have a well established pipeline for launching new games.
Kind of odd that we have different tastes.
I think there’s even been 2 days with a 1-word solve!
On March 1st, they removed the digital versions of the acrostic and cryptic puzzles. They've taken down the entire archive, including something like 150 cryptic puzzles and 450 or so acrostic puzzles. They also no longer publish either type at all digital, though they still are in print.
Jigsaws, Crosswords, and most recently Sudoku would probably cover the entire universe of extremely popular puzzle games.
Calling the results of the process “awful” is an incredible stretch to put it politely.
But there's also "Cats does Countdown" (full title: "8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown") which is comedians playing the exact same game, with the same two women looking after the mechanics of the game, but a comedian as host and the entire tone of the game changes.
Cats does Countdown's existence is a crazy story. "8 Out Of 10 Cats" is a comedy panel show, a mix of comedians and celebrities play a game, in this case based around advertising (hence the reference to dubious "8 out of 10 ..." type claims in adverts) and mostly the game is just an excuse for comedy, if you know the correct answer but that isn't funny, saying something funny is better. This show, like Countdown, was a fairly popular show on Channel 4, a public service broadcaster which is publicly owned (like the BBC) but funded by advertising (like commercial broadcasters), and to celebrate their 30th anniversary, Channel 4 mashed together some of its most famous shows for one-offs.
One of the most popular mash-ups was mashing "8 Out Of 10 Cats" with "Countdown" to produce "8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown". So, Channel 4 did it again for another one-shot later that year, which was also very popular, and as a result they commissioned entire series of the show. That has gone on for years since.
"Why Do the Chinese Copy So Much?" https://archive.nytimes.com/rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/201...
[0] wordle.comI don’t think this is a bragging point though. They’re bragging that a human is unnecessarily involved in a curation process, to give warm fuzzies to …. who? Something we’ll never be able to verify when it changes.
They’re bragging that engagement isn’t a priority because…. they’re wasting money in a way that people passionate about making games can’t afford to.
Should have just kept this one in drafts.
Personally I thought it an interesting view into how they go about developing a game.
The Economist seems to be doing well on its own terms as well-though that seems to be more around their research arm and their events arm. But the NYT is working to assemble an appealing subscription--which isn't all that different from Apple is doing with different particulars.
And, as always, that disadvantages individuals and organizations who have to make a singular item work. Which at the moment with games seems to lead to "free to play" and other approaches that aren't especially consumer-friendly but where you probably are standalone with a price-sensitive audience.
Why do you think that people who are passionate about making games are in poverty?
When the NYT does it I agree that’s a new low. I don’t expect humblebragging from them.
[0] depicted wonderfully in "pride and prejudice":
"Oh!" cried Miss Bingley, "Charles writes in the most careless way imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest."
"My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them -- by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."
"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."
"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."
"And which of the two do you call my little recent piece of modesty?"
"The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting. The power of doing anything with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.similarly, while algorithmic, procedural or more recently AI generated content is an efficient and cost-effective way to make games, having a human in the loop can optimise for fun in a way that a pure machine-driven process cannot. again, as a game maker i would be thrilled that the NYT is putting resources into supporting this sort of human involvement in a game.
They example they have (if I recall) was that they couldn’t guess the word, only to find out that it was related to holiday XYZ that was in the next few days and it seemed so obvious and dumb -- because now instead of having to figure out a word based on missing letters, you now needed to take into account current events, time, etc.
Of course, I can’t find the link at the moment… (so, maybe I’m making it up).
At $40/yr I would much rather get Apple Arcade, that's quite a shocking price for a subscription to a crappy indie studio.
I compare it to, say, Good Sudoku by Zach Gage (No affiliation). It has a wider differences in difficulty levels, based on the algorithmic patterns humans would need to use to solve them. The game includes a list of all the patterns you might need to use for a given difficulty level, and the hints are based on those patterns, which are the same you can find in any high level sudoku solving site.
Where The NY Times sudoku would point you cryptically to a cell, a hint system would say 'Given that one of this two cells must be a 9, that means that this other cell cannot be a nine', so you learn how you missed.
Not that NYT games is bad at all, It's just their sudoku that needs some help.
Funny because what I like the most about nyt sudoku is the difficulty (level design): they are on point for me, I always do the 3 in sequence, and it's always a pleasure. Hard is just hard enough for a good pastime. Sometimes Medium is harder than Hard, although it's rare, lol.