Why LinkedIn Now Wants You to Play Games
LinkedIn is nominally a site for finding jobs, networking with other professionals, and keeping up with the latest news in your field of work. In reality, its relationship to its users and their jobs is more complicated than that. It has job listings, yes, but since 2011, it’s also had a feed: a place to consume endless updates from and about people in and around your industry. The feed then got its own publishing platform and went more algorithmic. It got Snapchat-style Stories, at least for a while. LinkedIn even bred its own species of influencers and tested out TikTok-style videos.
What had started as a site for furtive job-searching and intercorporate networking had adopted and adapted to the fundamental priorities of social media, becoming yet another space for online public performance, only calibrated to the norms and expectations of pan-corporate office culture. LinkedIn is now a place to waste time reading about ways to save time, to post about grinding to avoid the actual grind, where you can recategorize — even just to yourself, subconsciously — aimless scrolling and screen time as something somehow productive. It is also, as of this past week, a place where you can play games.
In true LinkedIn spirit, this new gaming initiative arrives with a nod to self-improvement. “Connect over fun, daily games,” the site says. “Keep your mind sharp and compare scores with others.” The games are intuitive puzzlers in the post-Wordle tradition: sudoku-ish, crossword-esque, and Scattergories-adjacent.
