Why are online puzzle games having a moment?

Hooked connected LinkedIn’s Queens? Gotta widen your Wordle streak successful the New York Times games app earlier you commencement your day? You’re successful bully institution connected today’s Vergecast episode. Allison Johnson is joined by Simon Anthony and Mark Goodliffe, world-class puzzle champs and hosts of the delightful Cracking the Cryptic, a YouTube transmission wherever they lick a puzzle connected camera each azygous day.

They specialize successful sudoku — and not conscionable the classical fig games you mightiness beryllium acquainted with. Simon and Mark tackle mind-bending, seemingly intolerable puzzles, moving done it each successful existent time, sometimes implicit the people of respective hours. What happens erstwhile you get stuck? How tin you archer the quality betwixt a puzzle made by a quality and a computer-generated one? Why are we addicted to puzzle games each of a sudden? They assistance america ace the clues.

Then Allison sits down with Marc Levoy, 1 of the pioneers of computational photography, to speech astir his caller camera app: Project Indigo. Levoy is known for his earlier enactment connected the Pixel camera, and was a driving unit successful shaping telephone photography into what it is now. We last caught up with him successful 2020 erstwhile helium near Google for Adobe, truthful we got up to velocity connected what the heck he’s been doing for the past 5 years — and the important quality betwixt HDR and an HDR-ish photo.

Finally, Allison takes a hotline question from idiosyncratic who is not peculiar astir their telephone camera’s representation quality, but does person a beef with camera bumps.

Read much astir the topics covered successful today’s episode:

• Cracking the Cryptic — YouTube
• This 25-minute video is the astir riveting sudoku puzzle you volition ever watch
• The Atlantic is making a large propulsion into games
• I regret to pass you that LinkedIn’s games are precise fun
• The mastermind of Google’s Pixel camera softly near the institution successful March
• The encephalon down the Google Pixel camera is gathering a cosmopolitan camera app for Adobe
• Marc Levoy connected the equilibrium of camera hardware, software, and creator expression
• Adobe launches a caller ‘computational photography’ camera app for iPhones
• Adobe’s caller camera app is making maine rethink telephone photography