Lewis Gordon is a gaming and culture writer whose byline can be found at The Verge, NYT, FT, The Guardian, Vulture and more.
Of all modern technological devices, has any caused such self-loathing as the smartphone?
This pocket-sized computer is ostensibly a wonder: it gives us unfettered access to 24-hour news and a vast archive of audiobooks and podcasts whose volume surpasses even that of the British Library. It is also a log of photographic and video memories, a wallet and, of course, an entertainment device. It does everything, which is why I spend two and a half hours every day peering at it.
However, like many people, I yearn for this number to be lower, which is why I have stopped using my phone for gaming. That is, except for one title – or, rather, a compendium of titles: NYT Games.
Each morning, with a cup of coffee and the radio on (either trendy London music station NTS or Radio 4’s Today program), I open this suite of games. Typically, I make a beeline for Wordle, the charmingly simple word puzzle that burst into the daily routines of practically everyone during the Covid-19 pandemic. With each attempt at its five-letter word, I can feel my brain doing its morning stretches. The letters themselves are lightly animated – nothing too ostentatious, just gently flipping tiles which then do a little dance when you discover the answer. The game is neutral and soft (except when a stinker of a solution like “EAGER” arrives). I play at my own pace, though it’s unlikely to last any more than five minutes in total.
Now that I’ve warmed up, I move onto Spelling Bee, a delightful hexagonal grid which challenges you to make as many words as you can from seven letters (the catch being it has to include the central highlighted letter). I rotate the letters around to try and trigger new pathways in my mind, yet rarely do I score any more than a “nice” rating. I’m fine with that.
Then it’s onto Connections which challenges me to sort 16 words into their respective categories (today I grouped “down”, “game”, “in”, and “willing” as synonyms for “on board”). Again, the animations are subtle; your progress is tracked by stats, but these aren’t in your face. There are even achievement-like badges you can acquire. I’ve no doubt that some people get obsessed with besting themselves and other players in the aggregate, but not me – I’ve forgotten about these brainteasers just as quickly as I’ve played them. Disposability, it turns out, is fine; not everything has to be all-consuming.
Yet all-consuming is precisely how so many mobile titles, even those of an artful persuasion like Alto’s Adventure, have come to feel over the years. I’ve plowed untold hours into Candy Crush Saga, Grindstone, Super Mario Run and Pokémon Go, all of which offer breezy, pick-up-and-play fun, yet whose experiences, I think, are distorted by capitalistic motives. Through chiming cavalcades of sound and visual effects, these games offer some kind of serotonin-inducing reward for every minute of the player’s ongoing attention. I already spend too much time on my phone; I don’t need a game cajoling to me to devote more hours to it.
NYT Games don’t feel quite so pernicious in keeping you glued to your screen. But feel is the operative word because, of course, the daily refreshed puzzles in NYT Games are expressly designed to bring you back to the app and keep you paying for that monthly NYT subscription. It’s one of the canniest business decisions of the modern media era, part of the paper’s broader diversification strategy which also includes emphasising recipes, consumer product testing, and exhaustive sports coverage. Other media brands have followed suit: Vulture leans into nerdish movie and TV knowledge with its daily telematrix and cinematrix puzzles; The Atlantic is aiming to create its own puzzle empire.
But I have long made my peace with this retentive aspect of NYT Games. These days, over 10 years out from the creative height of mobile, it’s nigh-on impossible to play a mobile game that doesn’t have an ulterior motive – which is solely interested in some kind of unfettered, Platonic ideal of “play.” This doesn’t diminish the pleasure I get from NYT Games: I love these slight, straightforward puzzles which are perfect for somebody like me who enjoys thinking about words.
Perhaps the wrapper is everything: NYT Games is an undeniable time sink, maybe the live-service title I have accrued the most hours with. Yet its head-scatching pleasures are simpler and slower – crucially, it’s as if these low intensity puzzles exert less pressure on me to actually keep playing. So I don’t; the app remains closed until the following morning, the next time my brain needs a little jolt to start the day.