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SECURE YOUR SEAT At a time when companies are using AI to automate work processes and build products faster, The Atlantic is taking an increasingly unusual approach to its latest game: building it by hand, every day.
The Atlantic launched a new trivia game, called Rabbithole, this week. It’s the brainchild of Atlantic senior editor Drew Goins. A “Jeopardy!” champion himself (Atlantic managing editor and head of audience Bhumika Tharoor called him “Jeopardy Drew” in an interview), Goins wanted to build a trivia game for the “incredibly intelligent subscriber base” that The Atlantic has, he said.
Goins was inspired by Atlantic reader behavior he himself experienced often: reading an Atlantic article, clicking on a hyperlink in the piece, and then ending up with half a dozen different tabs open, he said.
Each day, he “voraciously” reads Atlantic articles and then chooses one to inspire a single trivia question. He then uses that question to come up with the next, going through his “mental Rolodex” to think of something interesting connected to the subject of that question, until he has seven questions in total. He searches The Atlantic’s archive, encyclopedias and JSTOR for help too, Goins said. Each question is worth three points, for a maximum score of 21 points. Players can ask for a hint, though that deducts a point. If a player answers incorrectly, they also lose a point but get a second chance with a multiple choice answer to select from.
“I come in in the morning and I read and I read and I read. When you do this long enough and you’ve written trivia long enough, things really do jump out at you,” Goins said. “A good trivia question is not just, you either know it or you don’t. It has a back door, a side window into the answer. You should be able to think your way to it. Each question should also teach you something, regardless of the answer. That’s what I’m looking for in The Atlantic’s coverage too. I want a good mix of Atlantic pieces. People will get tired if it starts in politics every day.”
In theory, it would be pretty easy to automate a daily trivia game – an algorithm could generate questions based on an Atlantic article, and continue to iterate on those questions. But that’s not how The Atlantic is crafting Rabbithole. Instead, it’s an extremely manual and human-involved process, centered around Goins.
Rabbithole is created “by humans, for humans,” Goins said. And while that does “require you to classify Drew’s brain as a human brain, which is questionable,” Tharoor quipped, the art of trivia gamemaking is one Goins takes seriously. Goins spends a few hours every day researching, writing and refining Rabbithole, while continuing his broader work and responsibilities on community development efforts. The Atlantic declined to share if Goins was compensated separately for his work on Rabbithole.
He hasn’t, however, built the game singlehandedly. A team of people from product, engineering and design came together to spend months developing Rabbithole, all from a storyboard sketched out by Goins. They debated various elements, like if the hole the rabbit hops through after each question should be vertical or horizontal, and whether the rabbit should be jumping or falling down the hole.
“The Atlantic’s strategy is a perfect example of what publishers should be focusing on, which is creating experiences that feel personal and are tough for AI to replicate. Yes, an algorithm could churn out trivia from an article, but knowing a former Jeopardy champ carefully crafted them with humor and thoughtfulness is likely to make it stand out,” said Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development and marketing firm Twenty-First Digital.
The hope being that those experiences ladder up to something more accretive to the publisher. Get Rabbithole right, and it becomes another way to build a daily habit with readers, get them to read the original article that inspired the game of the day, and then keep reading more related The Atlantic articles – eventually, hopefully, converting them into subscribers, Goins said.
To help foster that, the publisher is experimenting with making Rabbithole free for all to play, putting it behind a registration wall or putting up a registration wall after three questions. Plans are also underway to create a leaderboard so that players can share their score. Plus, there will be a Rabbithole-related activation at The Atlantic Festival event in September.
“The primary challenge for The Atlantic with a gaming product is developing a portfolio of puzzles at various levels of complexity that hook recurring players. Leaning into quirkiness and brand identity is an elegant avenue to start, but sustained commitment is the other critical pathway to residual stickiness, with on-time updated daily games,” said Gareth Sutcliffe, a senior analyst covering media technology and games for market research firm Enders Analysis.
It all ties back to The Atlantic’s push to build a community from its readership as a way to improve audience engagement and subscription conversion. In March, The Atlantic launched its Discussions product (basically a subscriber-only comments feature across its articles), which increased the time subscribers are spending on its pages by 40%, according to Tharoor. The percentage of subscribers participating in Discussions has tripled, Tharoor noted, but declined to go into specifics.
“Games foster daily habits in a way even excellent journalism often can’t,” Chowning said, adding that the social element of games helps encourage that habit. “Most people share their results with friends or a group chat. I know I do. And that fosters a fun daily connection with people in your life that is independent of the news cycle.”
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