People are often concerned and baffled by what young people are up to on the internet. But chances are, if you’ve recently spotted a 20-something on the tube or at a coffee shop staring at their phone screen, it’s probably not because they’re Facetuning an Instagram photo or stalking Alix Earle. In reality, they’re probably playing a word association game called Connections.

If you’re unfamiliar, the game presents players with a wall of 16 different words and tasks them with sorting the words into four groups of four by ‘connecting’ four related words at a time. For anyone in the UK, it’s not unlike the ‘connecting wall’ round of Only Connect, the BBC gameshow hosted by Victoria Coren Mitchell. The puzzle is part of the New York Times’ games collection, which also includes the Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee, Strands, and Wordle, which the company acquired from its original creator Josh Wardle for a seven-figure sum in 2022.

I know what you’re thinking: wasn’t Wordle a novelty of lockdown, when we all needed something to do that wasn’t clapping on our doorsteps at 8pm or baking banana bread? Well, just like working-from-home and hot-girl-walks, puzzle games are a habit that has stuck for plenty of young people, with Axios reporting that The New York Times games were played more than 8 billion times in 2023 – double the number of plays reached in 2022.

Of course, puzzling is traditionally considered an activity for pensioners. So how has it become a hobby that is seriously popular amongst Gen Z? And these aren’t just games people are playing casually either; people are obsessive about continuing their streaks, playing each of the games every day and posting about them on TikTok – over 140,000 videos have been made with the tag #wordle and videos about Connections regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views.

Some people are even making a career from posting about the NYT’s games online. 24-year-old Savannah DeLullo, better known online as @dailyxsav, has built up a following of 1.8 million people by posting about the puzzles and sharing videos of herself solving them each day. “I do TikTok full time now, but being an influencer was never something I planned or was working towards,” she tells Dazed. DeLullo was even asked to write a couple of columns about Wordle for The New York Times, where she described the process of filming herself playing the game as “performance art”.

The other people who have become unlikely celebrities online are the New York Times puzzle editors. Tracy Bennett, Wordle Editor, and Wyna Liu, Connections Editor, are well known by people who play the games, with people often addressing them in social media posts. “Wyna Liu we have BEEF,” a TikTok user captioned one video, which has over 90,000 views, of him solving a Connections puzzle he found particularly difficult. TikTok videos posted by the New York Times of Liu and Bennett also regularly gain hundreds of thousands of interactions; notably, a video of Bennett talking about the 1000th Wordle puzzle has over 1 million views.

“I was a very introverted person to begin with, and all the jobs I had were very well-suited to introverts, such as working on puzzles in this niche community,” Bennett tells Dazed, talking about her unexpected fame when she became the editor of Wordle in 2022. “I quickly realised that it was serious because the very next morning after it was announced that I was the editor [...] a Channel 4 news van had pulled up outside my house. At first I thought maybe my neighbours had done something nefarious, then I saw them walking up to my flat and realised this announcement had made an impact.”

So what is it about these puzzles that has people so invested? “Honestly, it all just tickles a very nerdy, repressed part of my brain,” says 25-year-old Chess, who plays the New York Times games every day. With most of us addicted to our phones, spending hours each day mindlessly scrolling, puzzles offer a simple and satisfying way to use our brains. “I do compulsively check my phone if I’m waiting around and don’t have a book on me, and since having the NYT games app I’m more likely to use that than scroll through Instagram,” Chess adds.

What’s important about the New York Times puzzles is that each of them are only available to play once a day, which is refreshing when you think about the endless content available to us online and how overwhelming that can feel. Plus, with so much social content feeling impersonal and the rise of AI in so many aspects of life, Bennett says she thinks it’s important that these puzzles are so carefully crafted by individuals. “One of the things that makes the games feel special is that [you can tell] they’re really made by real people,” she says.

The puzzles have also become an unexpected way for young people to connect with each other in an increasingly isolating digital world. “The really cool thing about Wordle and the other games is that everyone is doing the same puzzle every day,” DeLullo says. This means that they’ve also become a way for many people to check in with friends or family members on a daily basis. “My boyfriend and I do Wordle, Connections, and the Mini Crossword every night before bed together – it has become a bit of a ritual,” says Anna, who is 24 and based in Brighton. “It’s a nice addition to our relationship, as it’s something we always do together now.”

Bennett regularly receives emails and letters from people about what the puzzles mean to them and the people in their lives. “It’s my favourite aspect of the job, knowing that the choices I’m making are going to mean something to somebody,” she says. “For example, whenever I choose a word like birth, somebody’s going to have a baby that day and that will be a meaningful word for them that day.”

Perhaps playing these puzzles and sharing our experiences of them is strangely democratising, particularly when a lot of the content we see online is widely aspirational and unrealistic. These free puzzles are something anyone can do, knowing thousands of others are doing the same. “When people complain about a weird word or a bad Connection link on social media, it feels like an inside joke between you and the rest of the world that play the game,” Anna says. (Although it might not feel quite so healingly egalitarian when you’ve been spending the best part of 20 minutes trying to solve the purple category on Connections.)

With plenty of editorial publications facing financial issues right now and desperately trying to “pivot to social-first content”, no one would have thought that the way to lure young people back to old-school media was the crossword at the back of the paper. Maybe Gen Z – the so-called ‘internet generation’ – are craving something a little bit more analogue after all.