Betty is building a grocery list. Which of these doesn’t belong?
rice
sugar
butter
bread
Don’t answer yet. It wouldn’t be as fun.
When Heidi Erwin ’21 was a senior game designer at the New York Times, creating a puzzle like this grocery list was a routine part of her job.
Erwin, who developed the popular NYT word game Connections from conception, would pitch numerous conundrums to her team for inclusion in the weekly Gameplay newsletter. Involving little to no outside knowledge, these bite-size brain ticklers are meant to appeal to a wide audience and encourage players to rely on deductive logic and lateral thinking. Asking her during a Zoom call to craft one for BAM was, well, a no-brainer.
“Usually, how I would start is not thinking about quality at all. Just going for quantity,” Erwin said, leading me through her process of developing one of these riddles. “It’s helpful to pick an anchor to riff off of.”
She suggested “Brown” and rattled off a number of questions to explore. How could we play with the meaning of “brown”? How could we twist its shape, or camouflage its appearance? What words could it become if we swap a letter, or remove one? Homophones? Heteronyms? Hey, don’t forget rhymes! It was breathtaking how rapidly she offered new outlets for linguistic chicanery.
She opened OneLook, a website that functions as a search engine for words. Entering “brown” with an asterisk pulled up a list of phrases that start with the word. She sorted the results by prevalence and, among terms that have been exhaustively punned by fellow Brunonians, there were a number of food terms toward the top: brown sugar, brown rice, brown bread. Brown butter is less attested, but anyone who bakes has likely heard of it. Evidently, these ingredients will come in handy.
We’re early in our ideating, though, so we shouldn’t dwell too long on the food phrases.
Erwin compares this stage of design to, aptly, throwing spaghetti at the wall. Many ideas won’t work; try a bit of everything to see what sticks. She points out that you can make brown by mixing together a bunch of other colors; I point out that, like some other colors, “brown” can operate as a noun, a verb, and an adjective. We Google famous people with the surname Brown, then briefly consider the concept of an Ivy League–themed puzzle. We run into multiple dead ends, but it’s not too frustrating. It’s easy to dream about making a nine-to-five out of this.
Games are fun, but they’re also like work? Swing sets are fun; gossiping is fun; that doesn’t quite make them games. But you can imagine creating a very fun game out of the two.
Without spoiling the answer, landing on the central trick of Betty’s grocery list was our own “aha moment.” It’s the same principle for the puzzle solver: Many solutions won’t work, but finding the one that does, almost by virtue of struggling for it, is a thrill. As Erwin has proven in a nascent yet illustrious career, the rush of beating a game makes you crave another.
All work, all play
Gaming can seem like the one line of work for which you don’t have to grow up. In a way, that’s true.
Fortunately for Erwin, she was raised in a household that, at least on her father’s part, supported her early interest in games. “My dad is a chill gamer. He’s very laid-back,” she said. “There was someone in [my] home who said, ‘Let’s do family game night’ … He’s not getting mad at me for playing video games, in contrast to my mom, who was low-key getting mad at me sometimes.”
Her mother’s mentality, which she describes as more Type A, rubbed off on Erwin too. On the playground she played with her pink Nintendo DS and summoned imaginary creatures with her best friend. In the classroom she would ask her academic rival about his math test score.
At Brown she cemented games as a serious undertaking, designing the university’s first independent concentration in Game Design and Development. And why not? Video gaming is a global industry worth over $500 billion, and on a sociological level games of all types are culturally universal. One of the world’s oldest known board games dates back to 2600 BCE; the Mesopotamian artifact is housed at the
British Museum.
What counts as a game anyway? In her first semester Erwin debated this in Skepticism and Knowledge, a philosophy course taught by Professor Felicia Nimue Ackerman. Articulating the spirit of gameplay is elusive: Games are fun, but they’re also like work? Or rather, they challenge you to do or achieve something. Swing sets are fun; gossiping is fun; that doesn’t quite make them games. But you can imagine creating a very fun game out of the two.
Erwin cites philosopher Bernard Suits for the definition she agrees with most: A game is the “voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” Suits’ theory also outlines the concept of the lusory attitude, or the attitude a player must assume to play a game, which is to accept—nay, embrace—arbitrary rules and challenges for the sake of having a game to play. Erwin has the lusory attitude in spades.
Attitude is by no means the only reason Erwin is a luminary in game design, as proven by her inclusion on the Forbes 30 Under 30 games list in 2025. She balances her technical skills in software engineering and computer animation with a strong visual arts background. She writes and draws comics as a hobby, earning millions of views on TikTok for her comics’ cute design aesthetic and existential sense of humor. Even her leisure time spent gaming ladders up to her career. She works hard; she plays hard.
Erwin has always felt the greatest affinity toward puzzle games, or as she understands it, games with correct answers. So when she landed her role as digital puzzle designer at the New York Times, she was prepared to transform the department into a household name.
For decades NYT Games primarily released print crosswords, but since its formal launch in 2014 the department has expanded to 11 digital games that live on the NYT Games app. Last year those puzzles were played more than 11 billion times. Erwin designed three of them, including the aforementioned Connections, which comes second in aggregate gameplay after Wordle (an early 2022 NYT Games acquisition) and has spawned countless fan-made spinoffs by virtue of its simple premise and limitless adaptability. If you aren’t familiar, here’s the game: Sort 16 terms into four groups of four. The components within each group are connected—players have to figure out how.
On a good day players can complete the daily Connections over a coffee, leaving time for a game of Pips or Strands, the two other games Erwin saw through public release. The Connections categories ascend in lexical trickiness, and each player can only guess incorrectly four times. Players often pick out the most straightforward connection readily; for example, PLAY, REPEAT, SHUFFLE, and SKIP; all buttons on a music player. But how about ELLEN, SPINY, TIMER, and USE? Magazines with an added letter. Get mad. The Atlantic didn’t call it “the most controversial game on the Internet” for nothing.
Regardless, Connections is a hit. For Erwin, though, the success felt double-edged. For all her work on games, they suddenly felt frivolous. “What if there’s something better out there?” she asked herself.
Leveling up
Erwin received her first communication from Ben Pruzan ’17 last spring. Pruzan had worked in venture capital—the mobile gaming industry specifically—and found Erwin through the Nelson Center, both having been involved in extracurricular entrepreneurship as undergrads. He had a pitch for her: a new mobile gaming startup that is uniquely New York, full of passion, and driven by the elegance and joy of well-designed games. She’d serve as co-founder and lead designer. Last November she made her move.
The lusory attitude is to accept—nay, embrace—arbitrary rules and challenges for the sake of having a game to play. Erwin has the lusory attitude in spades.
The company, named Minetta Interactive after New York’s Minetta Lane, situated its mission around its location. “In every real tech city other than San Francisco and New York, one of the major growth-stage tech companies is making phone games,” said Pruzan. “The spirit of those companies is far less akin to Pixar. It’s just a tech job.” That’s why so many new mobile games are merely conduits for a militant volley of ads, sacrificing graphics and gameplay in favor of arbitrage.
Pruzan and Erwin believe that New York has the creative talent to make a more spirited enterprise. The co-founding team is rounded out by Bella Virgilio, a fellow NYT Games alum, and David Hohusen, the former game director behind the popular mobile game Dots. Together they’re aiming to build games that people are proud to play, or as Pruzan describes it, “games that have a bit of excitement and pride and spirit. You need someone like Heidi to do that.”
Like any good startup, Minetta is hungry. By Erwin’s tenth day on the job she had already ideated 20-some concepts for a debut game. Over the following months the company would prototype and pivot again and again. A dice puzzle game went particularly far in development, but after a round of play-testing in April it was paused due to a lack of internal enthusiasm.
The next idea, however, shows promise. In May, Erwin shared a prototype of Word Magic, at that point only five days old. The basic game mechanic is to combine words to create new words. EGG + HATCH = BIRD. BIRD + FIRE = PHOENIX. One level of Word Magic might ask you to create three state capitals.
Unsurprisingly, her deadline-tested propensity for wordplay is critical to the puzzle game’s feasibility. Early play-testing has revealed interesting shades of user behavior. Optimally, players will deduce the combinations and feel the thrill of “getting it,” but it’s possible to complete a stage just by dragging words around with little regard to their meaning.
Erwin also finds herself overestimating how difficult it is to surprise people. She showed me a clip of a play-tester trying a level themed on punctuation marks. One of the mystery words is PERIOD, generated from combining MONTHLY and CYCLE. “She has a little ramble, like, ‘That’s crazy,’” Erwin explained. “‘They put period in this?’”
While Minetta isn’t set on Word Magic yet, a good tell on Erwin’s behalf is that the rote aspects of the development aren’t feeling tedious. She said, “Making 5,000 levels of Word Magic sounds so fun.” At the same time, she’s aware of burnout and not letting the constant toll of the work steal her love for it.
The game, the attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles, is Erwin’s life. During her low period after the release of Connections, she took up marathon running, a seemingly counterintuitive method for slowing down—which she has gamified, of course, running 2,024 miles in 2024 and 2,025 in 2025. Another elaborate bit: Outside of work Erwin spent most of March and April co-planning a “horse party” involving a series of equine-inspired games strung together by puns, 80 custom illustrations, a rebirth narrative, and a reskinned unicorn piñata. She discusses it like it’s her greatest personal achievement.
For what it’s worth, when asked about her “greatest achievement” she mentioned that she goes all in to support her friends. Horse-party invitee Carlos Perez-Ruiz ’22 modeled his own independent concentration in game design after Erwin’s, the two becoming close friends as they pursued the first two Brown degrees in such a field and even collaborating on a joint independent study project. After graduating, Perez-Ruiz presented her with an idea for a single-player, role-playing video game, which Erwin endorsed and continues to help test. “It’s never dawned on me that an award-winning game designer is play-testing my game,” he said. “It’s always just felt like my friend is.”
Pruzan believes that it’s the synergy of Erwin’s intellect and spirit that makes her successful in the gaming industry. “She holds her work to an incredibly high standard, and she holds her friends to a really high standard. She would never cancel on a friend,” he said. “Heidi is one of the linchpins of the game community from [age] 25 to 35 in New York. All of her friends are gamers and developers and creative technologists, and it’s really cool to get to see how people gravitate to her.”
At the same time, Erwin now realizes that achieving her dreams doesn’t necessarily bring happiness. “I have a few close friends who are really good at feeling a sense of enoughness. I suspect that by the end of our lives, if we live to 100, they will have spent much more of their lives enjoying their lives than me. Not that it’s a competition.”
Play to win, but don’t forget to enjoy playing in the first place. That’s the lusory attitude. It’s not that serious. It’s just a game. Speaking of games, Betty is still building that grocery list. Which of these items does not belong? RICE. SUGAR. BUTTER. BREAD.
The answer: SUGAR. The rest of the words—RICE, BUTTER, and BREAD—remain words if you remove their first letter.
Ethan Pan ’22 is a Brooklyn-based writer and founder of Viction, a literary food magazine.