Building Mobile Games for Legacy Brands like the NBA, The New York Times, and Wordle
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From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist podcast, we're demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I'm your host, Luke Malks, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API. ♪

You're listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Shafiq Qureshi, who is a senior mobile AI game developer at The New York Times. He works on popular games such as The New York Times Crosswords, Connections, Strands, and Wordle, and is deeply interested in the intersection of AI and accessibility. Previously, Shafiq was a senior Android engineer for the National Basketball Association business and a senior data engineer at Business Insider.

In this episode, we discuss how they vet new game ideas for development at the New York Times and what they've learned about consumer behavior from the highly addictive and viral success of Wordle. How he balances innovation and experimentation with the responsibility of working for legacy brands and his development philosophies and ways he builds games and applications to ensure user accessibility. And now for this week's episode of The Brave Technologist. ♪

All right, Shafiq, welcome to the Brave Technologist. How are you doing today? I'm doing excellent. Thank you for asking.

Awesome. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. Don't happen to have people from the gaming side of things on. Give a little bit of color as to what work you do and what kind of led you into this world of gaming. Okay, great. Yeah. So currently at the New York Times, I'm working on our gaming platform, which our games are, I think, fairly well known now. So those include games like The Crossroad, of course, which is

been pre-digital. It's been a game of ours for quite a while. Wordle, which again, everybody knows about and has been one of our like flagships that led to more of our games coming out in the future. So that includes Connections and

Strands, which has been the most recent game that came out last year. Several other games as well, and more on the way soon. So I'm, again, specifically focused on the mobile platform for our games. And I've spent a lot of time building out the actual Android platform

application that supports the games and supports interaction with the games and playback and scores and all the features of managing archives and other things that all of our players are used to who use our games on a regular basis. That's an interesting experience overall because I've been in my history of

quite an avid game player and so being able to immerse my everyday work in the thing that makes me happy which is gaming and especially our casual games which are like accessible I think a wide audience feels really good because I think there's a lot of appreciation that goes on for what we do and what we put out there.

It's such a cool combination, too, when you think about like the New York Times is such a staple and like print publication, you know, over, you know, such a long amount of time. But even like people don't necessarily like think about how much games have been involved in that, too. Like Crossword's like such a it's such a fixture. Right. And now you're kind of having to incorporate mobile gaming into that. Yeah.

I would imagine there's almost like kind of like a reflex not to try and impact things too much that are so tried and true, but still add new things that are interesting. You guys have done a really good job like with Wordle and things like that, like finding that way to connect that and then make it super viral. Like, how do you balance all of that? Have you got freedom to kind of run with things or run ideas or like what's your mindset around this when you're thinking about ways to introduce games and get them out there?

From my perspective, and since I'm the developer, I'm usually, I'm implementing the ideas that are usually produced by the game developers and the game designers specifically and product and producers, et cetera. Being in this space, what's interesting is that like,

Just as a note that the entire team pretty much has like this ability to kind of contribute ideas from their different experiences and walks. We obviously have a process where we're like, we evaluate whether a game makes sense and we don't constantly release new games. As you see, like we have a game or two a year and we're,

Those games are usually very well received when they are released. Many people have joined them. But we do go through a lot of vetting through many different ideas. We have different pipelines and how we look at different versions of games, different features on their own as an individual thing outside of a particular game. We have sessions and working groups that we bring ideas in and we play around with them.

And we do little adjustments to maybe known concepts or come up with completely novel concepts, try to then funnel those down to like, I would say a fairly rigorous multi-step process. And eventually the end goal is to produce something that

we're fairly certain will be a hit. And we have a lot of evidence and we go through a lot of research stages and testing and user testing and other processes to ensure that because it actually is very difficult to create a game that really can reach out to multiple people. And that's what we're kind of aiming for, the accessibility and the overall enjoyment of the widest group of people and our readers specifically. But outside of that even,

as possible. There is a lot of room for ideation, but again, as I said, we're fairly exacting in how we decide certain things. I will also add to that is that our brand is very important as well. The Times has a known brand where we try to make sure that

the quality of our applications and products is true and reflects within our games itself. So we have quality and also simplicity as well, because again, as I mentioned already, our games, as everyone knows, everyone can play the crossword. I think everyone can play connections. And once you learn the rules, everyone can play wordle.

So there's a skill level associated with it, of course, that, you know, as you can get better, but it is also a process and, you know, a technique to ensure that that capability exists for a game. And that is very important to us, that the quality, all those factors, quality and accessibility and enjoyment, just organic enjoyment is something that can be emergent from the products that we produce. Yeah, so, so interesting set of factors to balance. I mean, because there's almost like,

the game concept has to be really killer in order to be simple enough to still be challenging and be useful. Like crosswords are so fun and time-consuming. There's not overly thought out, right? Like there's just a balance. And I think we talk to gaming people and stuff. Sometimes it's focusing on a really small cohort of hardcore gamers and the concepts are very out there, but like it's almost the inverse with you guys where it's like, how do we make something that's like

really minimal but fun something people want to spend time on like how you kind of capture that whole experience of like trying to open the newspaper to get to the thing it's such a cool crossover that you don't really see that often or i don't get the chance to talk to people there very often so it's so cool to like talk about that now there's also this new area of ai too in in gaming like where's your head out with that as a game developer are you using ai with what you're doing maybe not necessarily with

with the New York Times, but even more generally, what are you seeing that's interesting when you throw AI into the mix of things? A few things. So one thing I do want to note is that our games are the actual puzzles that are created and the games themselves and the mechanics, those are all human made. And we actually pride ourselves on that, the human personality, like continuing to

be the driving force in creating the games that we make. That's awesome. Yeah, we want to reach people and people reach people. And so that's kind of, you know, the overarching philosophy there. And then we believe in the creativity of our editorial process and of our editors and the many people who are involved in creating

actually producing the final output, which there are many people. And again, the editors are specialized and skilled in that regard in puzzle craft, really. So that's the craft element there. So in terms of AI in general, so as part of the New York Times, we have involvement in AI. There's information out there about like if you search for what we've done in that space, we do have a blog actually, which talks about some of our AI projects that are interesting and that

actually are powering like our subscriptions business. And in some cases we have like the tools that we've put out there, like something called brand match and other technologies that are taking advantage of newer AI developments, which include like things in the generative landscape and whatnot. That's actually a good place where you could find a lot of interesting information. I myself with AI and the New York times have recently an interesting thing I did actually last year was an experiment where

with getting handwriting recognition into our crosswords. That is on Neiman Lab. And if I can find that article, this was an experiment that was fun to do because, again, I was able to use my background because I have a software engineering background, but I also have an AI background as well. Oh, cool. Yeah, from a long time of working with, I guess, more traditional AI systems pre the generative phase of AI development currently. And that worked.

For that particular implementation, I was able to put those two together and do some detection on the crosswords and build that layer in to actually do that recognition, which is very interesting. And it's out there as well if you want to read about it. Awesome. Yeah. And what I would say is that the other thing...

things we do are like tooling. And so overall, I would say that's kind of like what we do, what we think about and how we think about AI. And again, our content is editorial and we pride ourselves on the people involved in building those things. And then at the same time, we recognize the capability of AI to enhance the productivity and the capabilities of people through the uses of tools and building of advancements and tools.

Yeah, that's awesome. I think it's like an important thing too. It might sound like common sense to people. In this space right now, there is kind of this tug of war going on of where do we keep the human element or how does this enhance it? There's like fear and all sorts of things mixed around that. And it's smart, I think, to balance that and to have that human, especially to emphasize it, like especially the brand and everything like that. It kind of puts people's mind at ease. I mean, when you think about things like Wordle and also with Hedges,

against kind of this background of short attention spans, things like that. What do you think it says about things when you see games like Wordle being so successful, like in this kind of context of like people having less attention span? I mean, people tend to play Wordle for a long time, I would imagine. Like you guys probably have the inside look on that. Like I can't imagine. It was so viral when that game launched, everybody was talking about it. It was really cool. Like how you guys tied that together. How do you put those two together? Yeah.

Right. Yeah. And that's actually a really interesting, I guess, comparison. And that's an interesting thing to think about overall. So the first thing that I think comes to my mind when I think about Wordle is that in games like Wordle and like other elements of games that

have the same feel for Wordle that we've created. I think that mostly it's the enjoyment of the game and the challenge of the game. I think that foments in people's minds and keeps bringing them back to the game. Because again, it's the elements of simplicity, all those things that I've mentioned before, quality, simplicity, but also challenge factor, which

As you had also alluded to, these are actually on their own. They sound pretty straightforward, but they are actually very challenging to implement all in a single package. All of those things together, I think, despite maybe the attention spans of people, you know, reducing and whatnot, and like, overarchingly, like media consumption being very like, give me what I need now, in many cases, and that I think...

What's interesting is there is the ability in World to like, if you're really good, you can finish a puzzle really quickly. Or, you know, you might spend a lot of time on it if you really want to get it without making a mistake or whatnot, or get it in as few chances as possible. I've seen people spend very long time on one puzzle and I myself have too, when I was like, I don't want to get this wrong. That enjoyment element of the game and our other games is what I think keeps people thinking about it. And it's that organic element, which...

Again, despite the sort of the media short attention span element will consistently appeal to a person's desire to like really care about something. And I think that's one thing that we sort of magically work with and the games hopefully improve.

despite maybe even in the future when people's attention spans are almost gone when it comes to media, we can still, through our process of vetting what a good game is, what a very enjoyable game that speaks to our brand and speaks to quality and accessibility, we can still, I guess, fight that tide and still constantly produce experiences that keep

People engage for long periods of time and on a repetitive and a routine basis that they have routines which they play and they come back to because they enjoy the game so much. When you were working on these things, did you anticipate it to go as viral as it did? Good question. I've been here for about two and a half years, so I kind of came after the Wordle migration happened. I've been involved in many understandings and seen a number of things that have been happening with the games over that time period and Evolution and Ternuri games.

I think it's kind of like an experiential and learning process from my understanding. So we did have...

the understanding of what makes people enjoy a game from an intellectual perspective because of the crosswords, which is something that's for a long time, crossword construction, crossword solving, you know, has we knew that engaged people and now extending that capability is sort of something that we're taking that understanding and then looking at newer products. And over time in,

increasing our understanding of what really helps to superpower that element for newer games. So again, it's like anything. We're like, yeah, like, oh, okay, well, we iteratively do something like this. Again, we test a lot. We don't live in a siloed ecosystem here in terms of like not understanding the gaming landscape. That's something that the team has a

quite a bit of experience with from years of experience in the times and elsewhere, bringing tons of gaming experience onto the team. So from that, that's something that's learned from just, I guess, lifetimes of just being involved in game building. Also things that we learn about like virality and like how people get kind of invested in something. I myself am doing research on this in a fashion on the side as well. And I'm doing some presentations and things on this, like just online,

overall like how something is is it how something is fun and it's also something that we see in a changing landscape because again we've dealt mostly with word games and we're investing in and we also have sudoku and like other number games and other things like that this is like as i like to think about it also an interestingly not

not fully explored space. So as we come up with a new game and we're like, oh, okay, wow, there's an appeal to connections which we might not have seen before. And it's just like unique and organic, very unique for the game that came out and compared to the gaming landscape, we're like, wow, okay, that's something that we discovered. We try to build upon from like newer products. So I'd say, again, it's something that we've learned, something that we've built experience from and something that is like kind of organically seeing the magic as it

That was one of those cool things where it was like, it felt like unlocking kind of a different dimension to things. Even with virality, right? Like you kind of like, okay, something can get amplified a bit, but it was one of those first times where I'm like, damn, people are like pinning their scores on their profiles. This is getting a whole other level of gameplay here. Like it's really kind of like you guys caught something in a bottle there. And again, I mean, I'm going to keep repeating myself here, but there's just something so cool about how

minimal it is, but then how it catches because of that. You mentioned too, that you all are testing a lot. How does that part work? Is there like a cohort of subscribers or something that you can tap into to do early testing on? Or is it something where you do like internal testing? I'm just kind of curious. Yeah. Some of it I can speak to at a certain level. We do have processes that I think are unique and like

very specific to us that are bespoke and that help us glean these insights. So those all kind of speak at a level which, you know, I can talk to. We do internal testing. We have testers from several different levels for different phases of analysis we do for our games. We may have some more casual users that are like, we'll see how they handle a particular demo idea or a test idea. And then if the idea hasn't like really caught internally yet, we'll focus like a team that's just like,

more like evaluating who has experience, whether a game even has potential or not. Those are like kind of like the first level testers. And then we'll have like if it did

determined to have a potential but needs tweaks then we need to like build on top of that then sometimes those tweaks are done to a prototype and then it goes to if it's accepted again by the first level testers it will go to another level that has either more experience or that is kind of like specifically geared towards looking at a particular feature and seeing how it feels there's a mix of targeting targeted testing and a mix of like general testing but it sort of expands as the

sort of appeal internal understanding of the appeal of the game expands and so on and so forth until like then we start doing things like beta tests and we start putting it out there in different regions and like we put it out there to the world to get that feedback but by that point the game has gone through several layers of like different kinds of testing from different perspectives to get to that confidence level that okay now we can have a the public see what's going on that's awesome

If you can talk about it, like, is there a recent project or a feature or something like that, that really kind of pushed you creatively or technically that people might find interesting to hear about? If we're talking about projects like that, I've done as features in the times, correct? It could be anything. Oh yeah, sure. So I'm always a fan of like computational ideas and things that like involve like computational strategy, et cetera. We have for a while had Wordlebot, which people can use the,

I guess validate how well they're doing overall with Wordle and compare to a bot, the solver, which is on the actual application. So this is something that happened last year. Actually, I have a few thoughts about like other more recent things, but we ported Wordle bot to our apps and those, that was a huge hit. The bot concept and the bot idea, it like really stood out as something that we understood that people wanted to evaluate and

what they were doing. And to me, it's very interesting because a lot of people do actually, we have several articles that are actually in the public about this. Like, you know, people like to play against the little bot and understand how they're doing overall and like against different metrics and against different, I guess, criteria and how many, how many times or how many words, how close were they to solving very quickly versus how, you know, how long it took

get past the point where they could actually solve effectively and still like continue on playing. That really speaks to me because again, I come from a background of like sort of AI development and we're all about, it's not like an AI or anything. It's a programmatic solver, but it's still using a process to compute metrics about a game and about a progression and evaluation as you're playing the game, which helps, I think overall people get better at it. And so this metrics different approach are,

in general, these things appeal to me. I've worked in other scenarios and other situations where metrics were very important to like evaluate whether an idea is feasible or not. I've worked a lot with like A-B tests and like different kinds of exposure and testing systems and data-driven analyses back when I was doing more analytic stuff, not here even prior to the times, on like

oh, well, is this even, are these two patterns like moving together of data? Or are these multiple like metrics related somehow? Are there correlations and things like that? Which sounds actually like an analyst's work, but I've worked with other analysts before. But also these kinds of ideas appeal to me, like finding anywhere, anything I can develop that finds like,

meaning or something computationally or emergently in the things that I work on. You know, I like, that's mostly like with that particular feature. And then I've, again, I'm involved in a lot of like AI presentations, like a lot of computational presentations. I've done one on, um,

Last year also on a procedural generation of environments like cave systems and plant systems and some of that I've posted about on my site, etc., that are just really interesting world-building simulations. And there's several games out there which take advantage of procedural generation and procedural content. And to me, even though now that these days that's being augmented with AI...

in itself that just it's it's fascinating where that can go because they're like you know examples of like infinite worlds being created in games that you know have like completely unique ecosystems of living creatures and things like that and all that that stuff like and i play around with a lot of that simulation stuff on the side that stuff is super fun

That's super cool. I mean, we've come a long way from SimCity, you know, like back in the day. It's awesome, you know. I know you kind of hinted at it earlier about wondering if people are improving. Do you actually see people improve when they kind of augment with the bot and try to kind of learn? Have you guys seen any like trends in that or is it something where you're kind of still looking at it? I'm just super curious.

I think overall, and I can speak to, like, even my own experience playing the game. I think there's a few elements to that. I do think that, you know, sort of organic awareness of how you're performing and have it measured actually does. It helps me improve, certainly. For example, like, you know, I would use, like, when I started playing Wordle, I would

use like not really great like starters, right? What I mean by not great starters are words that didn't take the larger distribution or more representative distribution of letters in our language into account. That is actually like a counterproductive strategy to playing a good wordle game. So you should start with like a word that represents, you know, more characters. And there's many people who've,

suggested words that are like good starters and whatnot. And it's kind of a fascinating thing. Yeah. And I think overall, I started to get better at selecting a word through multiple iterations and having an intuition of what could be the next word, just by looking at like the progression of like what a bot would select, because it's hard to quantify exactly sometimes, like, especially if you haven't like dug into it too much, but there is like a sort of thread between

between different letters and different lines of thinking of what could be the next letter in the word if you still have to make a decision, if there's like a little bit of fuzziness. Sometimes you get lucky and you'll play along with the bot. You know, the bot will make a good choice. And the interesting thing is that there's a reward mechanism

of the bot looking at your choices, I think helps to reinforce sort of subconsciously, maybe that you're on the right path as you're playing the game. So the next time you play, yeah, it's so, and so again, a little bit is a little bit fuzzy and a little bit, but, but,

There's a lot of, I think, multiple dynamics at play, nuanced dynamics at play in that game. Well, it's really interesting too. I mean, like, because I did a little bit of research too before the episode and you also worked for NBA in gaming, right? Well, it's really interesting to me, like thinking about

especially just what you were saying and all that can go into picking words out. You go from like an environment like the NBA where there's all of these different dynamics, multiple players in a court playing the game and all that and those dynamics there. And then you bring it also over to something more simple on Wordle, right? Like where it's like,

very, not one dimensional, but you know what I mean? Like it's very minimal in comparison. Like how was like, well, what did you do at MBA? What type of work was that, that you were doing over there? Yeah. So the work that I was doing there was, it was different. It's actually more in line with work that I used to do when I used to work at Viacom back in the day. So I

but the whole brand, the grouping of brands that's now like is paramount, et cetera. At that point I was doing more like media related specific stuff. So I was actually building the application to actually do the streaming media content. That was, that,

in the form of our different applications, our different mobile applications. So basically being able to select episodes, being able to like scroll through content and find recommendations for episodes based on, you know, what you've used already and having a whole account and authentication system. That's what I did over there. And then to the NBA, I continued that line of work, but the opportunity to work at the NBA was a great one where I got exposure to a lot of like very like

fast-paced mechanics because the development in the NBA when I was there was almost as fast-paced in many ways as the game itself. I would imagine, right? Yeah. Because you got to... Don't they work like seasonality, right? Or by year at least, right? If I remember correctly. Yeah, yeah. And I was involved in rebuilding one of our core application platform into what's called our next-gen experience. And that was... Actually, there was an article about when

in the 2022 time period when that occurred. And it was like a large platform shift across multiple platforms where multiple people were working on, for example, like the Android application, the iOS, the Xbox, the Roku application, several different platforms. We did a massive shift and then be able to a more like robust version of our application. So I was involved in that and I specifically worked on,

the Android TV application, the Fire TV for Amazon Fire TV and the mobile app and for the Android mobile app. And they all kind of shared a similar like process for ultimately delivering the live streaming of games to users in an interesting and engaging way. Such an interesting like juxtaposition, like in time to where you go, like you're working at NBA and on these media platforms,

right? As everybody's kind of switching to like cord cutting mobile, almost mobile first in a lot of ways. Right. And then at the same time, now you're like at the New York times where you like, you've got this like institution, right. That's very paper bound, but also kind of breaking into virality in a new way, like connecting with this new generation. It's really interesting stuff, man. Like it is super, super interesting. And I really appreciate you making the time to have the conversation. Well,

What are you most excited about, like outside of New York Times, just like kind of looking at AI and gaming and the space in general, like where are you spending time? I know you mentioned environments and things like that. What's really something that you're looking to spend more recreational time in on this front?

like as I mentioned, like simulations, environments, things like that have always been really interesting to me, like creating characters that kind of have a sort of personality in space can like move around and interact. And I guess the thing is with AI is that like, again, AI has been around for a while and has been involved in games for a while in different years. I've done like actually presentations on this, on the evolution of AI through like when it was first developed,

implemented in games like in Pac-Man and then like moved on to more advanced games to what we have now. It's quite fantastical in comparison. I'm looking forward to really where sort of the landscape and the advancement of gaming can go. And I think it's exponential because the recent advancements in AI, which some AI researchers had kind of known

we're always coming because, and maybe even if the public didn't know overall being in the academia of the space, I've been aware of kind of where the trajectory of AI was going over the last several years and the decade and decade prior that there was eventually going to lead to this like

realm of like you know autonomous ai robotics and just artificial intelligence and perhaps all kinds of like new interesting applications so i want to build experiences that still are within the ether because prior to 2022 i believe when people were just speculating on this stuff people had a conception of like what robotics and like ai could be and could lead to but there are so many emergent applications that have just been pulled out of like you know the development that have a

recently in terms of like, you know, how you can talk to AI, new applications of AI assistance, things that only two years ago we could never have imagined. I can imagine how many more are embedded within the technological ecosystem

I guess, framework of reality that we haven't touched yet, especially when we start applying more of the LLM and like vision capabilities to like different spaces. Like when we start looking at imagery, when we start looking at 3D projections, hollow projections, other like more advanced, even 4D stuff in time, all these technologies can be so much more augmented and newer applications be pulled out of these. And that includes in the gaming space. So excited.

for that. It's super interesting. I mean, too, there's like also just this, like you mentioned in 2022, it's like now you've got this like level of both accessibility and I feel like kind of this top-down mandate in the Fortune 1000 space to like put this everywhere. So like...

We're seeing it like you start to see things that you didn't expect to see, like just from people having access and trying this stuff out. Yeah. Like and like you mentioned, go back to Pac-Man. People aren't even really aware. I don't think of how far back like AI has kind of been in the gaming space. And I mean, once they start to think about it, they think, oh, yeah, yeah. You know, I was playing computer. I've done these things, whatever. But but, yeah, it's really fascinating stuff.

Where can people tune into your work or learn more about what you're doing or what you have to say out there? Like, feel free to plug away. We'll put stuff in the show notes, but love to give people an opportunity to learn more. Okay. Yeah, for sure. So I think my website is probably where I keep all my stuff consolidated. So www.shafiqkarachi.com. And that's kind of like my portal to like, like my YouTube channel, which is, again,

Again, after my name, I guess my Twitter and LinkedIn profiles and all that contains lots of different things. I do write on Medium. I am somewhat active and I'm planning on becoming more active. So my Medium also has my name associated with it, Shafiq Qureshi. Those are, I think, the best sources. And I will be putting out more interesting material over the next several weeks.

I guess, months there for people to digest if they're interested. Fantastic, man. Well, Shafiq, I really appreciate you again making the time. This has been a fascinating conversation and I think the audience is going to like it a lot. And I'd love to have you back too if you ever have anything interesting that you're dropping into the market or want to share any insights. I'd love to have you back too to revisit some of this stuff. It's been a really, really cool discussion. Thanks again for coming on. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. All right, right on.

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