675. Has the New York Times Become a Games Company?

The New York Times published an editorial in 1924 calling crossword puzzles a "sinful waste" and a "form of temporary madness." A century later, the same institution's games were played 11.2 billion times in a single year. The transformation is so complete that the Times now operates like a stealth games company—one that happens to also employ the largest newsroom in the country. But as chief product officer Alex Hardiman insists, "The New York Times is not becoming a games company." The tension between those two facts is the animating question of this episode.

The Ludic Century and the Structure of Play

Game designer Eric Zimmerman, who teaches at NYU's Game Center and wrote the defining textbook Rules of Play, argues that we have entered what he calls "the ludic century." In the 20th century, the dominant cultural form was the moving image—linear, enclosed, authored. In the 21st, it is systems of information: networked, participatory, and rule-based. "Games are an ancient form of human expression which for me have always been about systems of information," Zimmerman says. A chessboard is a state machine of inputs and outputs; playing chess is about exploring the permutations of that system. The same logic now governs how we work, socialize, and consume media. Wikipedia is not a fixed encyclopedia but a "bubbling cauldron of changing policies." The point is not that ev