[HN Gopher] How does the New York Times make a game?
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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.
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