[HN Gopher] How does the New York Times make a game? ___________________________________________________________________ How does the New York Times make a game? Author : drdee Score : 20 points Date : 2023-04-22 20:41 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com) | npilk wrote: | Isn't this just the numbers game from Countdown? This team could | have come to the same idea on their own, but it's a bit | suspicious how similar it is... | perfmode wrote: | i have an iOS cooking app i'd love to sell to the New York Times. | elecush wrote: | step 1: buy it from someone else [0] [0] | wordle.com | throwaway743 wrote: | They buy it. | JeveStobs wrote: | I came here to say the same thing | smt88 wrote: | It's not interesting to make glib comments based on the | headline. The article describes an extensive in-house game | development process. | xhkkffbf wrote: | The games department at the NYT is extremely lucrative. They get | to charge extra for it and the customers love it enough to pay | for it. My favorite job there is the person who "edits" Wordle. | That's right. There's someone with the job of picking the right | five letter word for the day. Now it's true that some words are | harder than others, but the choice isn't that hard. | pests wrote: | I didn't realize Wordle stopped using the preset answer list | that was distributed with the source since its inception. | Looking it up, appears to have changed last November. | e63f67dd-065b wrote: | Looking at https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en- | us/articles/115015852367-Digi..., it doesn't seem like they | charge extra to access the games? The all-access subscription | gets you everything, and the news-only subscription gets you | the news only. There's no "pay $x extra for games", only this | https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/games#view-subscription... | $40/yr. | | At $40/yr I would much rather get Apple Arcade, that's quite a | shocking price for a subscription to a crappy indie studio. | davely wrote: | Gizmodo has a piece awhile back lamenting this fact. You're | subjected to the whims of someone's jokery. | | 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). | ghaff wrote: | I assume the person who picks the word does a great deal more | than that in the course of a day. | fhgedhy wrote: | You're both right. That person has currently picked words up | to January 4th 4105. | xhkkffbf wrote: | That seems like a fair assumption, but I can't imagine what | that might be. The Wordle stack seems pretty static. | gverrilla wrote: | they have the best sudoku games I could find | twiceaday wrote: | If you like Sudoku, check out Sudoku + extra rules. This | channel solves them daily, which I really enjoy watching, but | they also have a link in the description to a great website | where you can solve it yourself, for free. They are all hand- | made. | | https://youtu.be/ejhtYYvUs5M | hibikir wrote: | An interesting choice. From where I stand, they have a pretty | bad sudoku implementation. While the UI is generally fine, it | has iffy definitions of difficulty, an woeful hint system, and | does nothing to make you get better. | | 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. | nonethewiser wrote: | This game isn't a unique idea. I've played it with pen and paper | before. It's common in China. | pclmulqdq wrote: | This was an interview question a friend of mine used. He | explained that it was a very common Chinese childrens' game. It | was also done on a British game show from the 90s: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfa3MHLLSWI | yieldcrv wrote: | I think its nice for consumers that NY Times gets to operate this | way, because its a side project they choose to subsidize. | | I 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. | throwaway22032 wrote: | Er, what? | | Why do you think that people who are passionate about making | games are in poverty? | yieldcrv wrote: | that's not what I wrote or implied. the article makes a clear | distinction about other game studios and there is a clear | reason other game studios act the way they do. | zem wrote: | as a developer i enjoyed this article thoroughly, and were i | passionate about making games i suspect i'd have enjoyed it | even more. game makers _know_ that engagement-above-all is a | cancer on games, either because it leads to dark patterns that | divorce "engagement" from actual fun playing the game, or | because it leads to the game being watered down to appeal | mildly to a lot of people. | | 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. | sneilan1 wrote: | I think you make a valid point. A lot of people today (mostly | influencers) increase their engagement through something | colloquially known as "humblebragging". This is bottom of the | barrel content that doesn't inform the reader but entertains | them. It's also been known in the past as yellow journalism. | | When the NYT does it I agree that's a new low. I don't expect | humblebragging from them. | zem wrote: | the increasingly misused term "humblebragging" refers to | bragging about something while pretending to put yourself | down in a show of humility[0]. this is just plain showing off | something you have done and are proud of, which is a | wonderful thing. | | [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. | gloryjulio wrote: | Not sure if I agree you. As someone who has play games for 20 | years but didn't know nyt has games, I found it informative | and fascinating. As long as they keep it factual and | informative, I'm fine with it | ghaff wrote: | I guess I totally don't get your point. Some organizations have | resources to create side efforts that people like. And the | Times has a game subscription so it's not _that_ much of a loss | leader. | | Personally I thought it an interesting view into how they go | about developing a game. | yieldcrv wrote: | Maybe I'm feeling especially cynical today | ghaff wrote: | Games are part of The (new) New York Times digital bundle | that I pay a not inconsiderable amount for. In the past I'd | have paid for other bundled items such as (if I lived in | NYC) the classifieds. | | 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. | unholiness wrote: | FWIW the results of this process are... awful. | | 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. | no_butterscotch wrote: | Wow! That's telling. I play 3 of their games every day and it's | those 3 haha (not the full size crossword which you have to pay | $, but the mini which is free) | e63f67dd-065b wrote: | I guess it seems kinda obvious that a news organisation is bad | at moonlighting as a game studio? They presumably have some | metrics that somebody looks at, but I highly doubt they are as | closely drawn to profitability as say an indie studio. | | > "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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-04-22 23:00 UTC)