What Can Games Do for The Boston Globe? A Conversation with Daniel King

The Boston Globe launched a brand-new games hub in April 2024. We spoke with Daniel King, Director of Games at The Boston Globe, about his experience setting up the games hub and his long-term plans for games on Boston Globe Media. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation:

I want to start by asking you a bit about your journey with games. How did you get started in this space and what’s your current mandate at the Boston Globe?

I started by making amateur board games myself when I was in college – I thought making board games was a faster way to start game design than video games. It’s a little easier to get started because you don’t have to program anything. I made some board games and entered into competitions and did pretty well. Then I was able to build a career off of that.

And of course, now I’m working at a news organization on their games. Newspaper games are their own niche. It is a very particular type of game design that comes with some real restrictions and some real challenges, but also a lot of freedom because you’re making pen-and-paper games where the human being is the computer in a lot of ways.

As the Director of Games, my job is to explore what games and gamification can do for the Globe, on Boston.com, or anything else in the Boston Globe Media Partners sphere. Right now, the focus is on The Boston Globe’s games page – these six games on this one page – making that as good as possible, and then we’ll go from there.

Can you provide us with some context on how this decision to invest in games came about at the Boston Globe? It’s a crowded market – how is the Globe trying to find its place in it?

The big thing is it’s all about engagement, right? People return to games daily. Hopefully, people will come to the Globe for the news, but we also understand that news fatigue is real, and that audiences can appreciate a diversion. Creating a habit-building daily game experience is a great way to get people to come back to the paper every day even if they’re just coming back to solve the Mini Crossword. They come in, they open the Globe website, and maybe while they’re there, they’ll look at the front page. It gives people something to check in on every day.

“They come in, they open the Globe website, and maybe while they’re there, they’ll look at the front page. It gives people something to check in on every day.”

If I’m thinking about grander ambitions for it, games have the potential to be cultural touchstones. Something that you have in common with people and can talk about over the water cooler, “Wow, I did the Mini in less than a minute today”. Creating a tiny little cultural touchstone for New England.

Could you give me some insight into your day-to-day operations as Director of Games at The Boston Globe?

My responsibility is to own our current games page, and in the future to own whatever games are in the world of Boston Globe Media. I am curating the jigsaw puzzles. I create and schedule for WordroW. There is some puzzle-design work I do, but I’m not a professional crossword editor.

My biggest job is to evaluate how things are going and to look for new game opportunities. Should we take this game out? Should we change this game based on feedback? Can we add a full-screen mode? I read all the emails, and get feedback from players.

What does it look like to create a games offering specifically for The Boston Globe audience?

We know a lot about The Boston Globe audience. We get a lot of feedback, and we know what they like. We knew people wanted access to more crosswords. People asked us, “How can I find the old crosswords?” So we have the archive now. We publish Sudoku in the newspaper, so it was a natural decision to also offer an online version.

Jigsaw, WordroW, Word Flower – those are experimental. In some ways, I see Crossword, Mini, and Sudoku as classic offerings for a newspaper site. But the other three, I want the players to tell us if they don’t like them. That hasn’t been the case so far. All the games are getting played.

Is there a synergy between the online games at the Globe and what you do in print?

I think right now, our goal is to make logic puzzles and word puzzles and math puzzles that our audience enjoys, regardless of digital or print. All our games are arguably playable on paper. WordroW is a game you could play on paper with another person. Word Flower, too. So for now, I’m very interested in staying in that space of simple logic games that give people a chance to exercise their brain a bit and have some fun.

I think that’s what people come to newspaper games for. They want a digital experience that mimics the traditional habit of opening the paper and playing sudoku or crossword. That’s the habit they’re trying to recreate on their phone, so staying in that world is good for us now. But that could change.

“That’s what people come to newspaper games for. They want a digital experience that mimics the traditional habit of opening the paper and playing sudoku or crossword.”

It’s a tricky choice, whether to make games free or put them behind a paywall. How do you think about it?

We know that we have loyal subscribers and our first priority is to improve the experience for them. We want to give them more to interact with. And just like the paper, parts of our games section are not paywalled to allow folks to sample the content.

Right now my focus is on the thousands of people playing the crossword every day. We want more of our existing readers playing and to have them playing more frequently. The crossword remains, by far, the subscriber favorite. The Mini Crossword is also doing well. It’s very popular. We’re definitely creating a new habit with the mini.

Do you plan to monetize the games, especially those that aren’t behind a paywall, using ads?

I see a lot of possibilities with marketing or ad integration, even though that’s not really my main focus. I do have a grand ambition of selling a sponsored game – it’s at least something I’d like to experiment with.

Who are some organizations you’re inspired by?

It’s always easy to say The New York Times. They invented this industry. I’m sure that’s not entirely fair, though. Other people were influential.

I am very inspired by Puzzmo, just from a messaging perspective. They’ve created a very human product. I can do their puzzle and then read why they wrote it or made the puzzle in a particular way.

The crossword world is also very serious. I’m starting to meet the big players and learn their names. Boswords is a Boston-specific tournament, and I’ve been talking to John Lieb and going to the events. It’s been really great to see the kinds of puzzles people are making and how interesting they are.

I do look at our product and think it could use a personal touch. I love that John Lieb edits our Mini Crossword. That personal touch, I’d love to bring more of that. That’s tough with Sudoku and Word Flower, but the jigsaw, for example, is very special to the Globe. Our Sunday crossword is unique. It’s local and created by crossword celebrities. Solvers know that it’s made by people who care. That we made this because we want to provide something bespoke for our subscribers.

How’s your experience been with Amuse Labs?

It’s been great. There is something to be said for not having to build a bunch of things from scratch. The complexity of the backend and the archive and the dashboard and the analytics, – it would take us so long to make anything like that, and frankly we didn’t have the expertise in-house. Amuse Labs has already figured that out, so when I want to experiment, change something in the sudoku, or make an interesting crossword, all of the technical work is done. It’s just about playing with the tools I’ve been given. That’s amazing.

“There is something to be said for not having to build a bunch of things from scratch. The complexity of the backend and the archive and the dashboard and the analytics, – it would take us so long to make anything like that.”

All of the papers that take this seriously are using Amuse Labs. Their crossword is the industry standard – it’s the best one you can get. It’s nice to feel confident that we have that, that we’re competing with the other big players in this space.