Thought Leader
I made a browser game. It’s about winning at professional networking.
You start as a Lurker on LinkedOut with zero followers and full credibility. You climb by posting. Every post is assembled from parts — a hook, a turn, some formatting, a call to engagement — and the platform tells you, before you publish, exactly how far it predicts your post will travel.
The catch is the direction of the incentive. The algorithm doesn’t reward your best writing. It rewards your worst: the fake vulnerability, the story about a barista that never happened, the line breaks after every sentence. The hollower the post, the further it goes. Your credibility is a resource, and the game is honest about what it’s for — spending.
I won’t spoil what happens when it runs out, except to say that the game does not consider it losing.
A run takes maybe 15–25 posts. It runs entirely in your browser and saves locally, so you can close the tab mid-descent and pick up where you left off. There’s a sound toggle and a reduced-motion toggle on the title screen.
This is the first game on the blog — I’m planning to make more, and they’ll all be collected at /games, each with a short intro post like this one.