Puzzle and game experts share their Big Ideas for 2025

Welcome to Gametime, a weekly newsletter recapping the past week of games on LinkedIn, what’s new in the puzzles space, and more — brought to you by LinkedIn Games Editor Paolo Pasco. Click 'Subscribe' to join the community and be notified of future editions.

Earlier this month, LinkedIn News released a list of 25 Big Ideas that will change our world in 2025, spotlighting predictions from our editors and industry experts regarding the trends that they think will shape the coming year in the workplace. So I set out to ask some experts in the puzzles and games world to share their Big Ideas for 2025.

A few of these experts are familiar to longtime readers of this newsletter: Thomas Snyder is a logic puzzle writer and expert, multiple-time World Sudoku Champion, and constructor of many of our Queens and Tango puzzles on LinkedIn. Nolen Royalty is a software engineer and game developer whose project, One Million Checkboxes, gained nationwide media attention this summer. Ryan Patch is one of the co-founders of the Great Gotham Challenge, an in-person puzzle experience based in New York. There’s also a new voice: Ada Nicolle, a crossword constructor and crossword tournament winner who released a book this past year. The ideas centered around a main theme: AI will only become more prevalent —and it’s up to game developers to wade through the hype and decide how they choose to use AI (or don’t).?

Thoughts on the future of AI in games from Snyder, Royalty and Nicolle focused on two main aspects: AI as a time-saving tool, and AI as an instrument in creative work. As AI becomes more prevalent across all industries, companies in the gaming industry will need a firm strategy on how they plan to use AI — what they are trying to achieve with AI, what advantages and disadvantages it can bring, and where it can truly make a difference.?

Thomas Snyder encourages a “trust, but verify” approach to using AI, taking care to make sure, if AI is being used as a problem-solving tool, that it is really solving the intended problem in a helpful way. “I think we need a 21st-century version of ‘trust, but verify’ to really do the best in these coming years,” Snyder told LinkedIn. “As you see the next thing a machine learning model has been able to do, it’s to know it’s really doing it, and not cheating around it or finding some hack to a solution. Has it really solved a hard problem in an important way to understand? These machine learning tools can’t always do that explanation for you, so how do we verify?”

This, of course, isn’t the only step in using AI effectively. Even in cases where AI has been proven to work, such as text or image generation, it’s important to ensure it’s being used in a way that is an improvement on human effort. Nolen Royalty told LinkedIn, “Obviously lots of people are trying to slam AI and everything together. But I think the naive ways that you can smush AI into a game (e.g. having an LLM directly power all dialogue) aren’t very fun.” Royalty cites games such as Infinite Craft and What Beats Rock? as counterexamples, noting that the two games operate in “a new genre that couldn’t exist without LLMs.” A similar point came up in a previous Gametime newsletter on Oasis, a version of Minecraft that’s entirely generated by an AI trained on Minecraft gameplay — it’s very impressive from a technical standpoint, but is the gameplay fun? Not really. As AI continues to become more and more capable, it’s important for game developers to establish a strategy for AI use and be conscious that it’s ultimately in service of creating a better product.

It’s no surprise that the internet and social media are important tools in the lives of puzzle and game developers (especially those who are independent). However, some experts are noticing shifts in how people use the internet, which will in turn have an effect on how people interact with internet games.? “I’m really interested in the ‘small web’ — websites and projects that are happy being personal and small. I think the small web movement probably comes from some combination of nostalgia for the early internet combined with frustration with the direction that many pieces of the ‘large’ internet have headed over the last decade,” Royalty told LinkedIn. The frustration he notes has especially come to a head in the last few years, in which major changes in a splintered social media experience have people seeking out parts of the internet that feel more personal.

Similarly, in the world of puzzles, Ada Nicolle predicts a growing shift towards highlighting individual puzzle makers. “I wouldn’t be surprised if more people started following the puzzle makers themselves instead of the puzzle outlets,” she told LinkedIn. Options for self-promotion like Patreon, self-publishing and personal websites all allow puzzlemakers to establish a body of work that’s not reliant on the support of a large outlet. Similar to the “small web” movement, puzzle solvers will find value in the idea of a puzzle from an individual creator, and the ability to interact with that creator online. “As more people write puzzles, and as more people become aware of them, I think more people will treat puzzle constructors like authors in that regard,” Nicolle added.

Personalization is a two-way street. As much as puzzle solvers can focus on individual puzzle creators, puzzle creators can equally tailor their output to their solvers as individuals. Ryan Patch said, "We're planning on leaning into technology more for our immersive entertainment and marketing initiatives, to enable increased personalization of experiences to individuals, which includes player tracking and branching narratives." The closeness between creator and consumer enabled by the internet is key here. Patch adds, "After nearly two years of prioritizing in-person experiences, there will still be a need for remote connection amongst friends or colleagues, and a new killer virtual game will appear and succeed. Think the next iteration of?Among Us."

Thanks to Thomas, Nolen, Ada, and Ryan for their comments!

?? Pinpoint: Harder week for Pinpoints: the Friday, December 6 all wear gloves puzzle, the Saturday, December 7 words that come after “dark” and the Wednesday, December 11 shades of green puzzle were all difficult, with solve rates of 67.1%, 68.7%, and 70.3%, respectively. I think it’s interesting that these three puzzles are all of different types, with one requiring lateral thinking, another requiring word association and the third requiring straight-up knowledge.

On the easier side, the Tuesday, December 10 famous painters generally treated solvers well, with a solve rate of 91.2%. The number of clues needed, though, was higher than normal — the average score of 3.6 indicated that solvers figured out the category for the clues (“Wood,” “Munch,” “Kahlo,” “Monet,” “Van Gogh”) somewhere between “Kahlo” and “Monet.” Grant Wood and Edvard Munch are a bit less known by name than the others, but you’ve probably seen their works:

Play today’s Pinpoint?

?? Crossclimb: The Wednesday, December 11 puzzle ending in two parts of a superhero costume (CAPE/MASK) had the fastest average solve time in the past month, at 1 minute 9 seconds. I saw many comments of people setting new fastest Crossclimb times (including a text from a friend showcasing their 11-second time, which has to be the fastest I’ve seen from anyone not named Geoffrey Forbes). Great job to everyone who felt on their game on Wednesday; I didn’t think the puzzle was especially easy, but you blew it out of the water.

One answer that’s been of interest recently was CART, which I clued on December 5 as [Wheeled conveyance pushed around while grocery shopping]. I got many, many comments from people who were used to calling it a “shopping trolley.” I hope they solved the December 11 puzzle, which clued CART as [American equivalent to what’s called a “shopping trolley” in the UK]!

Play today’s Crossclimb?

?? Queens: The Sunday, December 8 puzzle was very hard, with the average solve time being one of the highest we’ve seen in a while (4 minutes, 49 seconds). I wanted to highlight one design feature that made it feel different from the normal Queens experience: in the endgame, with only a few queens left to place, it wasn’t obvious where they should go. After making initial progress, we might end up at a point like the one pictured below. It seems like the puzzle should be over quickly, but figuring out where to place the next queen is surprisingly difficult without guesswork.?

One way to move forward is to use the process of elimination on the three available cells in the fourth column. Looking at the cells labeled 1, 2, and 3 below:?

If we place a queen in cell 2, two things will happen. First, every other green cell will be X’d out, since we’ve just placed a queen in the green region. Second, the cell marked 1 will be X’d out as well, since it’s in the same column as the queen we just placed. With these two things in mind, it’d then be impossible to place a queen in the third row from the bottom, since both of the available cells have been X’d out. The same is true if we place a queen in cell 3. Therefore, the queen in that column must go in the cell marked 1. This allows us to make the progress we need to finish the game.

Play today’s Queens

?? Tango: Solvers of the Friday, December 13 puzzle (titled “Thirteen”) noticed different emojis: a cat and a microphone. I hope the Swifties out there enjoyed the celebration of Taylor’s birthday, off the heels of the last show of the Eras Tour at that. Whether you haven’t heard a second of her music, or you can tell if the cat emoji looks the most like Meredith Grey, Olivia Benson, or Benjamin Button, the puzzle was a fun one. If you filled in every “Blank Space” with “Style,” make sure to celebrate a “Clean” “End Game.” If not, hopefully there’s no “Bad Blood” — just “Shake it Off,” wait for tomorrow’s puzzle, and “Begin Again.”?

Also, not to fuel any easter egg speculation — we have no idea when Reputation (Taylor’s Version) is coming — but did you notice there were thirteen given squares?

Play today’s Tango

Want to be notified when new editions are released? You can sign up for reminders for each of our games here.?

This week’s topic: Gukesh Dommaraju, 18, becomes the youngest-ever World Chess Champion

The 2024 World Chess Championship ended this Thursday, with Gukesh Dommaraju defeating reigning champion Ding Liren, in a best-of-fourteen-game challenge. In the first thirteen games, each player won twice, with the rest of the games being draws, so the winner of the fourteenth game would win the title. In the end, a late-game blunder by Ding allowed Gukesh to win the final game, making him the youngest universally recognized World Chess Champion at 18 years old — the record was formerly held by grandmaster Garry Kasparov, who won the title as a 22-year-old in 1985. For more coverage, see the article on Chess.com about the final game of the championship.

What do you think of the victory?

Share your thoughts in the comments below??

Know someone who would enjoy Gametime? Share it with them directly or your network by clicking the “Share” button below!