Linked

This is the inception story of how playlinked.net came to be.

You ever been so bored at work that you'll literally do anything to pass the time? Kinda like that episode of the office, something like "The Dunder Mifflin Games" where all of the employees play their favorite little desk game while Michael is away. Yeah, that bored.

Well, I have. I get bored pretty quick actually. Bored could be the wrong term, maybe distracted is the appropriate verb. I get distracted pretty quickly. I'm not sure if it is some form of undiagnosed ADHD or if constantly scrolling social media has absolutely shot my attention span to smithereens, either way after about 15 minutes of hard dedicated work my brain needs to take a load off.

Ironically, it was this lack of desire to work that prompted me to spin up this side project in the first place. My brother and I worked together, and to pass the time, we would play different trivia games. Since we are both big movie guys, our favorite game to play by far went like this: I would pick a movie and he would pick a movie and then we would try to link them together via actors who have acted in the same movie.

As an example, he would say Oppenheimer and I would say American Psycho. We would connect Cillian Murphy, who is in Oppenheimer, to Christian Bale who he acts with in The Dark Knight, and Christian Bale is in American Psycho.

Nothing too difficult, but a fun brain teaser to help distract us from whatever task was at hand.

We had so much fun playing that game that we found ourselves getting better at movie trivia than at our own jobs. We also would also play games like moviegrid.io and wordle in our free time and felt like, through a similar medium of free-to-play browser games we could share our game.

After a few months of sitting on it, I got with some engineering friends of mine who I had worked on a different project with. We brought in my wife, who is a product designer, to make the game look legit, and within a few weeks we had the first version of the game u and running!

And that is where we are today, with a very fun, albeit very rough, version of the game available for all to play. I hope that this game will bring as much distraction and joy into other's lives as it did to my own. And, if you ever have any suggestion on how to make the game more addicting I am all ears.

-Luke

This is the inception story of how playlinked.net came to be.

You ever been so bored at work that you'll literally do anything to pass the time? Kinda like that episode of the office, something like "The Dunder Mifflin Games" where all of the employees play their favorite little desk game while Michael is away. Yeah, that bored.

Well, I have. I get bored pretty quick actually. Bored could be the wrong term, maybe distracted is the appropriate verb. I get distracted pretty quickly. I'm not sure if it is some form of undiagnosed ADHD or if constantly scrolling social media has absolutely shot my attention span to smithereens, either way after about 15 minutes of hard dedicated work my brain needs to take a load off.

Ironically, it was this lack of desire to work that prompted me to spin up this side project in the first place. My brother and I worked together, and to pass the time, we would play different trivia games. Since we are both big movie guys, our favorite game to play by far went like this: I would pick a movie and he would pick a movie and then we would try to link them together via actors who have acted in the same movie.

As an example, he would say Oppenheimer and I would say American Psycho. We would connect Cillian Murphy, who is in Oppenheimer, to Christian Bale who he acts with in The Dark Knight, and Christian Bale is in American Psycho.

Nothing too difficult, but a fun brain teaser to help distract us from whatever task was at hand.

We had so much fun playing that game that we found ourselves getting better at movie trivia than at our own jobs. We also would also play games like moviegrid.io and wordle in our free time and felt like, through a similar medium of free-to-play browser games we could share our game.

After a few months of sitting on it, I got with some engineering friends of mine who I had worked on a different project with. We brought in my wife, who is a product designer, to make the game look legit, and within a few weeks we had the first version of the game u and running!

And that is where we are today, with a very fun, albeit very rough, version of the game available for all to play. I hope that this game will bring as much distraction and joy into other's lives as it did to my own. And, if you ever have any suggestion on how to make the game more addicting I am all ears.

-Luke