The episode opens with a trio of paid sponsor reads before the host utters a single word of content. Hotels.com touts its free membership rewards program and up-to-20% savings on hotel bookings. Amica Mutual Insurance uses a 'go far together' framing to pitch auto, home, and life coverage. Finally, TalkAboutPD.com breaks the ice on Peyronie's disease — a topic, the ad acknowledges, that men are often reluctant to raise — and directs listeners to consult a urologist about non-surgical options. These ads set a deliberately varied tone before Stephen Dubner's riddle kicks the episode into gear.

Dubner's riddle — what do we celebrate in children but look down on in adults? — lands on 'play,' and from there he constructs a case that games deserve more serious attention than they get. He quotes Canadian philosopher Bernard Suits' 1978 definition of game playing as 'the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles,' noting drily that it could double as a definition of life itself. The American Time Use Survey places gaming as Americans' second most popular leisure activity, behind only watching TV — and much of what we watch on TV is live sports, which are themselves games. Dubner frames this as the launch of a new Freakonomics Radio series: 'We Are All Gamers Now.'

Before introducing any guests, Dubner grounds the episode in autobiography. Growing up the youngest of a big family, he chased older siblings into whatever games they'd allow — including a version where his brother hurled a baseball at him to catch barehanded. His adult games of backgammon and golf, he insists, bring genuine joy. He admits it took time to shake the social pressure to 'put away childish things,' and arrives at a conviction: games and play are good for the soul. This personal confession creates the emotional frame for the more analytical conversations to come.

Eric Zimmerman, professor of game design at NYU and one of the field's most influential thinkers, opens with a deeply personal memory: his father, who died when Eric was five, used to play a yes-or-no logic deduction game with him — the kind where you figure out why someone takes the elevator to the 6th floor and walks up two flights (answer: they're too short to reach 8). This early pairing of logic and play shaped everything. Zimmerman's childhood games ranged from Monzo (wrestling on command) to Kick the Can and dirt bike races. His first designed game was a 5th-grade project called the Digestive Game, a board game where players were food particles navigating from mouth to exit, complete with a 'reverse peristalsis' space that sent you back to start. When Dubner asks him to name the best games, Zimmerman demurs — it's like asking a painter their favorite color — but singles out Dungeons & Dragons as uniquely influential for seeding concepts like player classes, experience points, and levels throughout all contemporary gaming.

Dubner asks the obvious question: what does a game designer actually do? Zimmerman's answer is crisp — they make rules. Not illustrations, not code. If you think about what a board game designer contributes, it's entirely about structure: what you do on a turn, how you win, how the experience flows. Zimmerman studied painting at Penn under high modernists obsessed with pure form — line, color, composition — who were disciples of Josef Albers. But the real art world of the late '80s was postmodern and political: Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, the Guerrilla Girls, AIDS-crisis conceptual art. That tension between formal structure and human expression directly shaped Zimmerman's approach to games. His book Rules of Play, co-authored with Katie Salen, is now a defining textbook of the field. He also designed Diner Dash, one of the biggest casual computer games of the early 2000s, before founding the NYU Game Center about 15 years ago.

Dubner floats his own working definition: games are the 'willful, collegial adoption of random-seeming rules.' You agree with your fellow players that these rules hold, and the moment you do, you enter a new space — not a different person, but a different version of yourself. Zimmerman pushes deeper: games sit at the intersection of formal mathematics and raw human emotion. He argues that immersion is widely misunderstood — players conflate it with 3D photorealism, but you can get utterly lost in backgammon, where the space is purely social, cognitive, and strategic. His most striking claim: games create meaning. A chessboard on a coffee table means one thing ('I'm intellectual'); the same board in active play generates an entirely new 'latticework of meanings' around turns, stakes, and contest. The sweetest satisfaction in game design, he says, is watching players do things you never anticipated — just as grammar can't explain Shakespeare.

Around 2013, Zimmerman published a short essay arguing that the 21st century is a 'ludic century' — and here he unpacks the argument. The 20th century was the age of the moving image: a darkened theater, a linear narrative, a passive audience. The shift into digital culture has dissolved those hierarchies. Wikipedia is the new encyclopedia: not experts handing down facts, but a roiling community where users blur into authors. Games, Zimmerman argues, have always been built on this logic — a chessboard is a rule-based state machine, and playing it is exploring the permutations of a system. As our lives become thoroughly enmeshed in digital networks — for work, finance, romance, governance — games provide the best conceptual framework for understanding how that world works. It's not that games are the only lens, he concedes, but they may point toward 'an interesting, playful future' where beauty is created by players, not just authors.

If you want evidence that Zimmerman is right about the ludic century, look at the numbers. The global video game market has vaulted from $13 billion at the turn of the millennium to nearly $200 billion today — dwarfing both the movie and music industries combined. When an industry reaches that scale, firms from adjacent sectors rush to attach themselves to it, the same way everyone is now branding themselves as 'AI companies.' Dubner cites Allbirds — a shoe company — as an extreme example of this trend, having announced it would exit footwear and pivot to AI infrastructure. Then he poses the question at the heart of the episode: has The New York Times done something similar with games?

Before Dubner speaks with anyone at the Times, he checks in with Zimmerman for an outside view. Zimmerman's take is generous but grounded: the idea that the NYT is now 'one of the world's biggest publishers of games' would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. But it makes sense as a natural extension of the Times' decades-long dominance in crossword culture — an institution that already understood game players. He praises the design quality of their digital games across graphic design, interaction design, and content sophistication. And he adds a personal note: many of the people staffing the NYT Games team are his former students.

Alex Hardiman has been at The New York Times since 2006, starting in product marketing and advertising. She recalls her first week on the job included figuring out how to sell sponsorships for the Freakonomics blog. By the time Dubner is interviewing her, she's Chief Product Officer of one of the world's most-watched digital media pivots. Ten to eleven years ago, she says candidly, the Times was playing defense: only about 1 million digital subscribers, a shrinking newsroom of about 1,300 journalists, and no clear path to growth. The newspaper monopoly that had long supported the business — classifieds for jobs, real estate, cars, legal notices — had been shattered by Craigslist, then gutted further by Web 2.0 search and social. Many news organizations chased traffic by unbundling their content. The Times decided in 2015 to go the opposite direction: subscription-first, destination-first, and built on direct reader relationships — though Hardiman notes the digital paywall actually launched in 2011.

The episode breaks for a cluster of sponsor messages. Figure, described as the number-one non-bank HELOC lender in the US, promotes its fully online home equity line of credit with approval in five minutes and funding in as few as five days — and points listeners to figure.com/ADAM. Ozempic follows, touting its semaglutide tablets at 4 and 9 milligrams and directing listeners to ozempic.com. Southern Company rounds out the break with a message about investing $80 billion in energy infrastructure. These reads are thematically unrelated to the episode content but sandwiched between the NYT subscription backstory and the Times' own gaming history.

The Times' anti-game past is one of the episode's richest ironies. While rival paper the New York World published the first modern crossword in 1913, the Grey Lady published an editorial in 1924 calling crossword mania a 'sinful waste' akin to mahjong set overpricing. Dubner reads the passage aloud with evident pleasure. Then, 18 years later, the paper reversed course entirely: 11 days after the Pearl Harbor attack, Sunday editor Lester Markle wrote to publisher Arthur Sulzberger arguing that the country needed a puzzle to occupy the 'bleak blackout hours.' The NYT crossword launched in February 1942. Hardiman links that founding logic — using games to keep minds engaged during crisis — directly to the present moment, noting the parallel between wartime anxiety and today's geopolitical turbulence. Last year, the Times' puzzles were played 11.2 billion times.

Dubner offers a provocateur's hypothesis: if Wordle disappeared tomorrow, readers would storm the barricades, but if the Times stopped covering geopolitics, fewer people would notice. Hardiman disagrees firmly — 'I think you're really wrong' — and invokes the solar system analogy that defines the Times' internal strategy: news is the sun, giving light and permission to everything else. Games attract tens of millions of daily players and bring new readers into contact with the Times' journalism, creating a flywheel. But games don't generate the audience, engagement, or revenue that news does. Hardiman also addresses a journalist friend's complaint — that there's more 'pop' attached to games than to serious reporting — calling it a privilege to ensure that games revenue cycles back into the newsroom first. The Times is targeting 15 million subscribers by 2027; it currently stands at nearly 13 million.

Jonathan Knight came to the Times not through journalism but through gaming — FarmVille, Words with Friends, and a career-long affection for casual games. He describes the games R&D lab he helped build: a protected creative space where new game ideas can come from anywhere, inside or outside the games team. The lab is designed to nurture ideas before they're subjected to market pressures. Knight provides a candid failure case: Digits, a math-based puzzle that Dubner actually liked but that struggled to find an audience. They tried bringing it back a second time. It still didn't work. 'People are scared of math,' Knight concludes, and the game is now shelved. The failure illustrates that even a well-designed game can't overcome audience psychology.

Josh Wardle built Wordle for friends and family — it was actually his second attempt at the game after putting it down and returning to it. The green-and-gray emoji grid that players share after each round grew organically out of community feedback during peak pandemic Twitter. By January 3, 2022, when the NYT's own newsroom published a feature about the game, it had about 300,000 users and was clearly going viral. Knight read the article that morning, got multiple forwarded messages from colleagues, called Wardle two days later while flat on his back with COVID, and moved as fast as he could. The acquisition was announced publicly on January 31, 2022. The Times won't confirm the price, but it was reported as a low seven-figure sum. Wardle was eager to sell — the game had grown beyond his capacity to manage — and the Times was eager to acquire something that already 'looked and played like a New York Times game, very clean, very elegant.' It brought tens of millions of new users. The Times, Knight notes, aims to be good stewards of it.

Knight is careful to say that NYT Games was already growing before Wordle arrived — the acquisition was an accelerant, not the engine. The key metrics the team watches are day-1, day-7, and day-30 retention: what percentage of new users come back tomorrow, next week, next month? These numbers predict growth and longevity better than any other signal. New games are tested in Canada, geo-locked to the web, and surfaced through the Wordle hamburger menu so they reach a real but contained audience without running away from the team. Games that can't move retention even after solve-rate improvements are cut. Wordle's secret: a 90%-plus solve rate. Players feel accomplished, and they come back. Connections, by contrast, has a volatile solve rate — often low — but excellent retention because even failing is satisfying.

Dubner asks about AI strategy. Knight's answer is the opposite of most tech executives': NYT Games is doubling down on human-made puzzles. The rationale has two prongs. First, consumers are perceptive — they can sniff out a machine-made game, just as Wordle clones proliferated online without capturing the same feeling. Second, human curation matters at scale: Tracy Bennett's word choices, the discussion of double letters, the cadence of the week's puzzle selections — all of this is invisible but felt. The punchline is Connections: AI companies have told the Times their models still cannot reliably solve it. The misdirects, the human trickery, are too hard to replicate. And there's a brand dimension too: beating a NYT puzzle feels like beating 'a New York Times human,' not just any algorithm.

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With the NYT's games success attracting imitators — the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and others have launched their own game divisions — Dubner presses on whether this is a durable business or a fad. Zimmerman provides historical context: FarmVille had 83 million monthly players in 2010 and generated 12% of Facebook's revenue at its 2012 IPO. Then player fatigue killed it almost overnight. The pattern repeats in gaming: a new platform or revenue model gets so intense that players reject it and move on. Knight, who ran FarmVille at Zynga, pushes back from inside the Times: Wordle has shown 'incredible resilience,' and the desire for people to associate the Times brand with quality puzzles is built to last. The answer isn't to chase the trend — it's to keep innovating with new puzzles that re-engage existing subscribers and attract new audiences.

Dubner raises the tension between useful habit mechanics and dark gamification. Knight lays out the NYT Games philosophy with unusual clarity: 'time well spent' means respecting the player's time and agency. Some subscribers do Wordle, Connections, and Strands before their brain is fully awake; others unwind at night. The Times doesn't want them in the app all day. Knight says he doesn't even track minutes per day or per session. Streaks exist, but are purist — break it and it's gone, no paid streak protection. There is a segment of achievement-minded players who track purple-first finishes in Connections (Knight himself is approaching 100), but the design philosophy consciously avoids the coercive monetization tactics of the broader mobile game industry.

Crossplay is the NYT's newest and first multiplayer game, requiring account creation to play — which is already driving new registered users. Knight describes it as a 'clean and simple and elegant take' on the Scrabble category, distinguished from the treasure-chest-and-pop-up morass of most mobile games. Dubner calls it a Wordle-adjacent 'ripoff' of Scrabble; Knight prefers 'elegant take on the category.' The game's retention numbers are the best Knight has seen in his career. Most notably, Crossplay ships with Game Review powered by Crossbot, an AI that analyzes every move after a completed game and shows what better options were available. The design philosophy, Knight explains, is genuinely trying to make players better — not just maximizing time-in-app.

Dubner raises a pro-social argument: games teach players to agree on rules, compete fairly, and walk away after a handshake. Zimmerman accepts the point but pushes back against reducing games to their social utility — you don't justify a symphony by its downstream effects on society. Games belong in the same pantheon as story, image, and song: essential forms of human expression with intrinsic value. Yes, they enrich lives and create social situations for identity exploration. But they can also be exploitative, manipulative, pornographic. The same form that enables beautiful prosocial experiences has also 'pioneered dark design patterns.' The responsibility for which version you build lies entirely with the designer.

Asked whether he supports gamification, Zimmerman calls himself 'the loyal opposition.' Gamification pulls from frequent-flyer logic: apply game mechanics to drive behavior change. Points, levels, achievements — none of that is inherently wrong, and nudge-theory design has produced genuinely positive outcomes. But Zimmerman's core objection is that gamification leaves behind the soul of play: creative problem-solving, productive conflict, the anguish of striving and losing. His analogy is cuisine reduced to nutrition facts — the inputs matter, but they're not why you sit down to eat. He extends this into a design philosophy: every design embeds a theory of what it means to be human, from the materials of a chair to the rules of a game. The best game design honors the full range of human experience — including the 'furious contention' and 'anguish and pain' of striving, which he calls beautiful.

Dubner closes by inviting listeners to email which games they find beautiful and why. He then delivers a personal shoutout: listener Joshua wrote in to say his fiancée Stacy is a huge Freakonomics fan, and Dubner obliges with warm wedding wishes. Production credits roll — this episode was produced by Theo Jacobs, edited by Ellen Frankman, mixed by Jake Loomis, with a long list of Freakonomics Radio Network staff. The theme song credit ('Mr. Fortune' by The Hitchhikers) and composer credit (Luis Guerra) follow. Then, in a post-credits coda, Dubner reveals today's Wordle word — 'laden' — and immediately realizes he has spoiled it for Hardiman a second time. Cross-promo ads for Vitamix, 99% Invisible's 'A History of the United States in 100 Objects,' and Clorox Disinfecting Wipes play before the network end card.