Alex Hardiman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, absolutely. Because we definitely learned a lot. When we acquired Wordle, it was a simple web game with no backend. That meant that people's stats and streaks, which was that was the value in terms of social currency that people were sharing after playing, those stats and streaks were stored in local browsers. It was really important for us to make sure that the game board experience in the core loop of the game remained unchanged. But we also found that because everything was stored locally and people care so much about their stats and streaks, if they got a new iPhone, if they switched browsers, all of a sudden they lost all of that history that they had with the game. What we decided to do was undertake a project to connect Wordle to a New York Times account, which was free, because Wordle is a free game, just so that it knows who you are and so that your stats and streaks can be protected. Then, we could also bring Wordle to more surfaces because we wanted ... if you go to the homepage of the news app or if you go to the games app, we wanted to make it easier to find because people would come for Spelling Bee or Crosswords and they also wanted their Wordle. It was a pretty big effort to rewrite Wordle in our tech stack, give people the ability to store their stats and streaks, bring games to all of our major surfaces. We just tried to do it in a thoughtful way, where we didn't break anything. The experience was hopefully seamless, and that the only thing you would notice that's changed is that the New York Times knows enough about who you are so that your stats carry over and you can play anywhere. But that doesn't mean that there aren't some surprises along the way, especially when you're doing backend work. We had this pretty crazy moment a couple months ago, right when the Supreme Court's draft ruling on Roe v. Wade leaked. An engineer on the games team happened to notice that the Wordle solution the next day was fetus. Which is just an extraordinarily bad coincidence, because the word had been loaded into the game by the game founder months beforehand. It was so important for us that we didn't have ... this lovely diversion from the news feel almost like it was commentary on a very contentious story that was happening. I don't know if you caught wind of that, but you'd think that you could easily change the word on the backend, but because we were midstream on the migration process and some users were on the original Wordle game, others had migrated to the new version. It meant that we actually couldn't change the word on the backend for everyone, only for some people. This was a moment where we just had to come out and really tell the world, "We're mid integration. We're really not trying to communicate more than Wordle being a fun diversion from the news. Here's what happened, and why." Everyone understood. out and really tell the world, "We're mid integration. We're really not trying to communicate more than Wordle being a fun diversion from the news. Here's what happened, and why." Everyone understood. This is where coming out being really transparent about the facts and in some cases just exposing more about the product development process really helps demystify some of the rumors that people might otherwise think. It was one of those like, "Oh, man, I couldn't have imagined that that type of terrible coincidence would happen." But you just have to be prepared for everything, even when you're integrating what should just be a fun game.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.