After they were spotted in testing back in March, LinkedIn has now officially launched its new in-stream games, which are designed to give LinkedIn users a break from the grind of their workday.

As per the video clip, LinkedIn’s new puzzle games are intended to provide a moment of relief for professionals, while also, of course, helping LinkedIn increase in-app engagement.

As explained by LinkedIn:

“Our goal at LinkedIn is to continue to find ways to bring professionals together to stay informed and connected. That's why starting today, we're weaving thinking-oriented games directly into the LinkedIn experience. We want to give people a way to exercise their brains while taking a quick break, but also give people a reason to connect with others. We hope that these games spark banter, conversations, and even a healthy bit of competition among professionals around the world.”

LinkedIn is launching three in-stream games to begin with:

• Pinpoint is a word association game: “There’s five words inside a grid, and your objective is to guess what common category all the words belong to.
• Queens is a logic game, where the aim is to fill the grid with queens so that there is only one queen in every row, column, and region.
• Crossclimb is a trivia game: “Think of it as a combination of a crossword and a word ladder”.

There will be one edition of each game, updated daily, so they won’t take up a heap of your time, with scores and performance stats displayed on a scoreboard that’ll show comparative performance between connections, companies, schools, etc.

Which does seem a little out of place, and really, a fairly blatant effort to boost time spent in the app. But at the same time, you can see how this will likely help to boost engagement, and give people another means of competitive distraction during the workday.

A good comparison would be Worldle, which, at peak, had millions of people participating in its daily competition. HQ Trivia could be another example of a popular, short-term puzzle game that garnered a heap of attention, and these are seemingly where LinkedIn’s looking with this new element.

And at the least, you can imagine that a lot of people will probably try out these puzzle games, and with cross-company ranking, there will be employees who feel a dedication to their employer, and a compulsion to take part.

As such, it makes sense for LinkedIn to experiment with games. And while it may seem a little bit off-topic, it’ll also be another element that’ll help increase its current “record levels of engagement”.

I mean, I would still question whether it aligns with the platform’s broader mission to “connect the world’s professionals to economic opportunity”.

But so long as those engagement numbers go up, it’s all good. Right?

You can try out LinkedIn’s gaming options here.