How To: Play Games on LinkedIn (No, Seriously!)

I won't lie, I never thought that I'd be writing this tutorial!

It may seem like a random choice for LinkedIn to introduce games to the platform, but according to Daniel Roth, Editor in Chief, VP, it was no accident. Roth says,

"Our goal at LinkedIn is to continue to find ways to bring professionals together to stay informed and connected...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."

As of today, you can play three different games:

• Pinpoint: Consider a game of word association where players are presented with five words. The challenge is to accurately determine the category these words belong to, using the least number of guesses possible.
• Queens: Queens is similar to Sudoku but uses chess pieces instead of numbers. The objective is to position queens on a grid such that no two queens can attack each other, ensuring that each row contains exactly one queen.
• Crossclimb: Crossclimb combines trivia and wordplay by starting with a given word, and each subsequent word changes by just one letter.

How to Play:

According to tutorials and press releases that I've seen, you can access the games one of three ways: in the News module on your LinkedIn homepage, in the My Network tab, or at linkedin.com/games. However, the only option that worked for me on desktop or mobile was that link above. It should bring you to a page that looks like this:

Here you can choose one of the three available games.

Pinpoint looks like this:

Queens looks like this:

And Crossclimb looks like this:

My thoughts:

Hmmm, I'm on the fence about this one. I do see value in brain boosting games, and I did feel like playing each helped to energize me. I also like seeing a more playful side to LinkedIn with a more unserious feature.

That said, I didn't find the games all that enjoyable? I found the instructions a bit confusing and the games felt boring to me.

I also can understand the feedback that games can distract from your work day, not necessarily add to it, although LinkedIn is combatting that by only letting you play once a day, so that isn't a huge issue.

Overall, I think that this is more of a feature introduced to keep people on the LinkedIn platform longer and also daily, since many users are not checking it every day. So I certainly see the benefits for LinkedIn.

Do I think it's valuable for professionals? I don't. Maybe if they plan to integrate them in messenger so that you can play WITH other professionals instead of solo that may help break the ice while networking, but as of right now, I think time is better spent contributing to collaborative articles, writing a newsletter, or simply reconnecting with colleagues via messenger. I think this one gets a meh from me.

Let me know what YOU think in the comments!

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Until next time...

Love and coffee,

Mick