The corporate environment has become a bit more colorful and geometric. LinkedIn has officially withdrawn the veil on Patches this morning, which is the seventh original title to enter its ever-growing gaming ecosystem.
Placed in the role of the logic-obsessed brother to the already popular Zip, Patches is more than just a distraction, it is an effort to transform the morning coffee break into a group brain-busting session. LinkedIn believes that a square and a rectangle can be the only thing that can help us to remain humanly connected in the world of doom-scrolling and artificial intelligence noisy sounds.
More than the Résumé: Why LinkedIn is Playing Games
The internet received the puzzle queens and tango with a general raised eyebrow when LinkedIn introduced puzzles in the first place last year. “Is this Facebook in 2012?” skeptics asked. However, the statistics tell otherwise. Based on the latest engagement reports published by LinkedIn, approximately 86 percent of players will be able to come back to the platform the following day to protect their leaderboard position.
Playing Patches: The Fine Arts of the Stitch
Following the example of the Zip (you draw a line-like pattern through numbered tiles) Patches takes the emphasis off of path, and puts it on area. The game has a grid and a set of numerical clues, which are offered to you. Your mission? Place as many non-overlapping rectangles and squares on the board as you can get.
The Core Rules:
- The Answer is the Key: This means that a certain number on the grid contains an exact number of spaces that cells need to occupy.
- Geometric Constraints: Thou can only make rectangles or squares. None of L-shapes and no diagonals and no gaps.
- Complete Coverage: To win, all the white spaces on the board have to be “stitched-up” into a patch.
What is so beautiful about the game is its false simplicity. On a Monday, you may get the puzzle in less than half a minute. By Friday, though the grids are bigger, and the game has become a complicated elimination game. It is a game, which trains the same skills as project management: spatial awareness, allocation of resources, and the ability to view the big picture in dealing with the small details.
The new social layer: Humanizing the High Score
LinkedIn is putting a lot of bet on the social side of social gaming.
You will shortly be able to do with a new set of features:
- React to Results: is a feature where users can respond with a “Mind Blown” or “Good Game” emoji to the score of a connection.
- Favorite Competitors: Competitors Tag certain colleagues or mentors to follow their day-to-day progress in a personalized rivalry feed.
- The Climb: Visualize past data to get to know who is on a 30-day Zen streak or who has the lowest average solve speed in your sector.
Read also: LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky explains why he does not think five-year plans
The Zip Connection A Design Philosophy
There is a deliberate decision to refer to Patches as inspired by Zip. Zip turned into a sleeper hit due to the fact that it was accessible to the people with aphantasia (the inability to visualize mental images). Since Zip and now Patches depends on concrete grid logic and not abstract wordplay or heavy mental rotation, it is now among the most welcoming games on the platform.
It is a turn of the gaming strategy of LinkedIn: it leaves the clones of Wordle and approaches Pure Logic Puzzles. The games can be played irrespective of language by emphasizing numbers and patterns and therefore the games are a global attribute to a platform which cuts across 200 countries.
Read also: MIT’s Silent Sense – New Wearable Lets People Communicate
The Importance of the Course to Your Career
It is a little trite but there is a psychological advantage of having a small win you can solve at the beginning of your workday. In a work-related world where most of our puzzles such as market volatility or team interactions require months to resolve, completing a game of Patches in 45 seconds offers a jolt of dopamine that frees the fog in the mind.
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