The Mastermind Behind Daily Murder Mysteries

Hello! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Hey hey everyone! I’m Greg T. Karber, the author and creator of Murdle—a murder mystery puzzle game that helps hone your mind and improve your logical thinking. In Murdle, you’re given a set of clues, weapons and locations, you have to figure out who had what, where and then which of them is the murderer.

Right now, I’m primarily a writer, but I dabble myself in a lot of things, with game creation on the side. I’ve created many games and narrative pieces that evoke thoughtfulness, existential meaning and philosophical introspection, such as lettuce climb, The Space Beyond, Philo-socratic games and more.

Murdle’s not just a daily game; it’s also available as a book series, with three volumes available! A USA Today and #1 Sunday Times bestseller, the book series has also won the 2024 British Book Award for Book of the Year, so check it out if you have a penchant for investigation and puzzle-solving!

What’s your favorite game to play?

This is both an easy question and also maybe a strange answer, but chess is my favorite game to play, and it's something that is not only a kind of compulsive obsession but also an object of thought that I just love to return to. I've probably read 30 books on chess, and they have not made me better at it, but they have given me this great respect for a game that evolved over such a long period of time into something that is so compelling, so interesting and endlessly rewarding.

There's just something to it. And, you know, chess evolved a lot. Originally, I think that early forms of it involved luck. You rolled dice to tell you which piece you had to move. And then for hundreds of years, after they removed the dice, the queen was the least powerful piece on the board, pawns could move two spaces at the beginning and castling didn't exist.

Then there was a period a couple of hundred years ago, I can't remember exactly when, which they were like, “Chess is too slow. We have to speed it up.” And I just think that's such a modern kind of game design concern that it's funny to see it occurring around the 1600s. And truly, the addition of a powerful queen in chess is, to me, so integral to the game. 

It’s wild to think about that game existing without that mechanic and how different it was. And I think it's just such a great lesson to game developers that even if your game is finished for 200 years, there could be something you could add to it that would really put it over the top.

Addiction to quick and casual games

I’ve heard that one of Hey, Good Game’s co-founders, Nate, is a bit addicted to bullet chess. I'm actually dealing with the same “issue”, so to speak. I have played so many bullet chess games and I got into it because I'm always addicted to some mobile game on my phone. They’re usually very, very simple games, something that takes like a minute to play. 

I was addicted to Flappy Bird and other quick games. This was the thing that kind of weirdly pushed me into chess. I was obsessively playing that Super Mario Run iPhone game where you tap to make Mario jump. And I just so love sitting down and focusing in on something and it takes about a minute of your life. It doesn't consume you, but you may not realize it, those minutes add up.

And after spending six months getting slowly more obsessed with Super Mario Run, I just felt it was kind of depressing. It's dispiriting that I'm giving so much of my life to this very simple game. You know, I'm kind of embarrassed to be playing it. It's a great game though, I highly recommend it!

But when you're hooked on a video game, it says you have to start thinking about what that says about you. And I remember I played this online game called TagPro that I really love. It's a browser game that I was also lowkey addicted to. You’d roll around as a little red or blue ball and you capture the flag of the opposing team, and best of all, it's a free-to-play browser game. It's probably ten or twelve years old at this point. And it's that kind of thing where you can go from not playing a game to being in the middle of one in a minute.

Comment on multiplayer-reliant games

I started to realize, like, wow, I'm spending a lot of my time playing these games. And I started to feel that TagPro, like a lot of online multiplayer games, started to fade over time. The player base was not as robust, so to speak, as it was eight years ago. Sometimes you can't even get a game going, and I was very dispirited by that.

With games that demand some kind of online functionality or other people playing it, you're sort of always vulnerable to, “Oh, nobody plays that game anymore.” Like, it's over for you. And with chess, I was like, okay, people have been playing chess for hundreds of years. They will probably be playing chess hundreds of years from now. If I get hooked on chess, at least it'll be something that makes me seem like a cultured individual, and it won't be something that time strips away from me.

Like, I'll be able to be an old man in the park playing chess. Because compared to like, my other addiction, I don't really believe I'll be an old man in the park playing Super Mario Run. As for my chess stats, I have played, and again, I want to stress that I am not good at chess, I have played 44,000 games of bullet chess.

Addiction to chess

A year or two ago, I hired a chess tutor because I actually wanted to get good at this game. And she was like, “Send me a link to your profile.” And I sent it, and she was like, “You have played more chess games than I have in my entire life. Why am I teaching you?” And I was like, “Well, they're all bullet games.” And she was like, “Oh. Oh no, this is not good. You need to play longer chess games if you want to get better.”

But the idea of sitting down and playing even a ten-minute game, that's half an hour. That doesn't fit into the compulsive play that chess fills in my life. That moment where you're waiting for 45 seconds and instead of being bored, you play a game of chess.

People get so good at chess, and I jest when I say this, but I think they look down on us regular folk. There is a coffee shop near me that is the highest-rated chess play in Los Angeles in that kind of, you know, informal environment. And post-pandemic, there's a lot of really great LA chess organizations. I used to go to the LA chess club, and there was this really sweet, great chess-playing Iranian man who ran it.

When I went there, I was by far the youngest person there who was over the age of ten. So it was mostly old men and kids or grandkids. And it was such a very lowkey environment, lectures on chess that really, I guess, nobody else wanted to attend, which I loved, though. But post-pandemic, the LA chess club, the great man who ran that passed away over the pandemic.

And there was a bit of a time when there was no LA chess club. But this woman has started the LA chess club. It has no sort of institutional continuity with the old one, but she's taken that name upon herself, and it is like a robust, packed crowd of 50-60 people every week. It's packed!

And chess is back in a way and is relevant in some sense. I think The Queen’s Gambit was huge. Someone was telling me that it became, I think, a year or two ago, the big middle school craze in North America, that teachers were like, “Stop playing chess! You've got to stop this!” I remember when we were kids, it was like, yo-yos were really big for one semester, and everybody had a yo-yo, and one year it was Pokemon cards. And it warms my heart so much that it's chess.

Oh, and that coffee shop I was referring to earlier, Hikaru Nakamura sometimes drops by and plays. I never realized it was the strongest chess area in the city. It was just the closest coffee shop to my house that had chess. And I'm playing this game with some guy, and he just immediately destroys me. You know, like, three or four moves in. I'm already losing, and I make a move, and everybody's like, “No, bad, bad, horrible move!” And I said, “I'm just trying to avoid losing so badly. I know I've lost. I'm just trying to avoid embarrassing myself at this point.” It was just brutal.

It was brutal. But it's like a trash talking coffee shop, and I kind of love that aspect of it. If you like chess, you can play a real buttoned up, very sophisticated game. You can also go to a coffee shop and get dunked on by your opponent. You’ll just stroll in as a casual and then end up playing against a man who spends all of his days doing nothing other than playing chess and therefore cannot be beaten by any mortal.

Before being a mystery writer, what were you doing?

Well, I was doing a lot of things to make ends meet! I was working as an ACT/SAT tutor, mostly for, like, really rich kids, which started out as a really fulfilling thing. Over time, however, it became something that was drudgery to me because I started to question the point of teaching one person how to do better on a standardized test that was curved.

I started realizing, like, everybody I help, it meant somebody else's score goes down because these tests are normalized. And that started to distress me. But I do think that the process of tutoring a large number of kids one-on-one, watching them solve problems, figuring out where they got stuck and what they found trivial was hugely helpful in understanding how people's brains work about puzzles.

And particularly, there's a section on the ACT, the science section, which is really like, should be called something like graphs and charts. It’s really more of a reading comprehension and deduction sort of section. Science is sort of a misnomer. They are science papers and experiments, but you're not asked questions that are expected to be a process of the scientific method, so to speak.

Relevance of tutoring to Murdle

But basically, the way the questions worked is sort of the way that a Murdle works. And I don't think I conscientiously or I consciously was pulling this over, and I just realized it as it was coming together, which is that movement of, like, you have a question or a clue, and then you go to the data set, which in Murdle is the suspects, the characters, the weapons.

You figure out what that clue means, and then you go down to the deduction grid in a Murdle or to the answers in an ACT science section. And that process of getting a question, looking at the information, figuring out the answer, then moving it back to the question. I just found such a compelling gameplay loop, so to speak. And I think that had I not been doing this tutoring job, I would not have understood that part of the joy of solving a puzzle is really moving your pencil around. Like, going from this thing to that thing to this thing. 

It was also very helpful in understanding a concept that I sort of came up with while I was tutoring, which is, I would tell kids our brains are oatmeal because kids always sort of think that they've got it figured out. Once they've got it figured out, their brains are like steel traps, and they will inevitably proceed from the beginning to the end with no mistakes and no errors.

And seeing people solve these problems, it's just so often you see in someone's brain, a six becomes a nine, or “this one was bigger than this one” becomes “that one was bigger than that one” in the process of moving it over. And I think that was very helpful for me as a game developer, to sort of have a really realistic view of how people's minds work. 

I think it's so easy when you're making a game and you understand it so fully, to forget how overwhelming a new user interface can be, and maybe it's a little weird to talk about the pages of a book being a user interface, but I definitely thought about it like that. How you can convey a large amount of information in a way that is clear and that tells people where to go when, what to look at, what you can look at first, and then ignore what you need to really study. And it was very helpful. 

More on his career before Murdle

Before I was doing Murdle creatively, I ping-ponged around between a bunch of different things. And I made little philosophical games with a little guy who took excerpts of philosophical works that I liked and tried to dramatize it in some sense. 

And then I made that game lettuce climb, where you play a little head of lettuce that tries to roll and bounce your way to the top of a procedurally generated mountain. And I made a collection of bite-sized horror games. I would have random, small ideas. I'd get very excited by that small idea, and then I would make that small idea. And if it worked well, I'd do four or five more of them until I had sort of been creatively exhausted. And then I would move on to the next one.

Because of that, my portfolio, so to speak, was very scattershot and very unfocused. And when I was asked to describe who I was in, like a biography, and they had me send my biographical paragraph or whatever… I never could figure out what to do or what to say. And so a couple of years ago, I sat down and I decided that I needed to focus very specifically on interactive murder mysteries. And I was going to only make a project if it felt like sort of a golden age Agatha Christie mystery with some sort of modern, interactive twist to it.

I planned out 20 different ones of these and Murdle was the first one, and I expected to move on the next week to the next one. And then immediately, Murdle kind of took off. And it wasn't like it became really big all of a sudden, but immediately, people really responded to it in a way that if you're a creator, you’d know about the experience of spending years on something and then releasing it to people, and they receive it warmly.

All creators know that feeling of releasing something and people are like, “Eh, it’s alright.” and it can be devastating. But for Murdle, people really responded to it well. And I remember the first week after it came out, I sent out a poll to all of the new email subscribers, multiple choice and there were twelve options. And I said, “Okay, what should I work on next? Should I make this? Should I make that? Should I make those?” And one of them was like, “Keep improving Murdle.” And that was like the 80% answer that I should focus on expanding and extending this brand more.

Other pursuits

I have a horror-comedy musical that I have co-written, co-directed and have been editing for years. And it just takes forever to make a movie. I would say even more than to make a video game. I don't know, they're both herculean. But with a movie, there are so many tasks that can't be made smaller. You know, you can make a small video game, but you can't make a small feature film all willy-nilly.

So I listed all of these projects that I've had some idea of in my list and people just wanted more Murdle. And I give the people what they want. If people tell me they want me to do something, then that's what I'll do. Killer Party is something that we have worked on forever, but in our spare time and with spare money. These days, if you see a movie, at the end of the film, you know, there's like 5000 people who are involved in the film. And I always remember being like, “Who are all of these people?” And now I'm like, “Oh yeah, you need about 1000 people to make a movie.”

That's about how many you should have. And I also think now, like, I remember as a kid they would announce some big film. Like, they're gonna make a Superman movie. And they'd announce it and it's coming out in five years. And I remember as a kid being like, “Why is it taking so long?!” And now when they say a movie's coming out in five years, I'm like, “Good luck. I hope it goes smoothly.”

I don't mean to just come and talk about how much work everything is, though. What I also realized about making games, is that I think all mysteries are games in a way. Even if it's just a book that you just read normally, there's a mental game that you're playing of trying to figure out whodunnit. Making games is, to me, the most fun thing in the world. It's the most rewarding thing in the world. So as much as sometimes I'll gripe about the effort involved, I certainly wouldn't trade it for any of the other forms of labor that are out there.

Can you tell us more about creating games and going into Murdle?

I really wanted to make sure with Murdle that I wasn't making something that would addict people in a bad way. I am very conscientious of that. I don't want to be in a position where I'm making something in people's lives that they start to resent or that starts to represent a part of themselves that they need to work on. I don't want to be the game that you play when you should be going to bed and then you end up being tired the next day at work or school.

I don’t want to be the reason why your life is collapsing and your parents are yelling at you to stop playing it. And that concept of being able to play it only once a day, to me, is just so enriching because it allows you to have a relationship with players. You're not trying to gobble up every moment of their lives. You're not trying to figure out how you can hook them for another two hours every day. You're trying to provide something that gives them a kind of soothing ritual, a gentle joy every day.

And one of the things that I really love about Murdle is, even though it is, inherently, a single-player experience, it's something that a lot of people do communally. Either they compete with each other or work together to arrive at the answer. When people come up to me about Murdle, they always have two ways of working on them; with friends or their partner.

Some people work on them together, and they go through the clues together, and they figure out what it means. And some people each have their book or their phone pulled up, and they race each other, and it's competitive. I've always kind of wondered, do one of those people have stronger relationships? I've always suspected that maybe the competitors are maybe healthier than the collaborators, but I don't know.

And I just love that people can come to it in different ways, that there's something really great about a puzzle. And this is the first puzzle game that I've made that actually took off. And it's just been so delightful to see how people interact with it differently, and they choose their own ways to interact with it as opposed to, you know, with most video games.

I shouldn't say most, I don't want to exaggerate, but in a lot of games, there is a set way that you can interact with it, and you play the experience that the creator provided to you. And I think there's a great thing with puzzles that everybody goes about them differently. Some people ask friends for help. Some people race friends. Some people cheat or look up guides. Some people don't finish them and just kind of read through them, challenge themselves a little and then move on.

And I'm just very happy to provide something that people can come to on their own terms like that and not something that dictates how you should experience it.

Is everything within the design of Murdle intentional?

It's a great question because I think a lot of times you make something very intuitively, and then when it's over, you talk about it as if you made these very conscious choices that really only revealed themselves to you after you had made them. You know, I think that for Murdle, I had a huge asset, which was that I made the first one when I was procrastinating on a writing project, and I made it on a napkin for a friend. 

I took a picture of it and sent it to him while I was at a coffee shop, and he really liked it. But that one was a very simple puzzle. It didn't have the characters, it didn't have the funny descriptions. But I continued to send this one friend drafts of the game as I developed it further. And I really only got his feedback until it was something like 90% done. And I think that that was so crucial to it working. That is the thing that I feel I consciously try to recommend to people—make a game or anything for a single person in your life. 

I'm not saying only don't get feedback from other people! That was a particular thing for Murdle that I think I kind of left out. But I previously made a lot of these games imagining a wide audience or an imaginary audience, and you don't really know what an imaginary audience will like. You imagine they'll like whatever you're making, but you don't really know. And it's so easy to convince yourself that some idea is going to be beloved. And then when you actually put it in front of people, you know, they're like, “It's pretty good. I like it.” So underwhelming.

And making this for one person and sort of adjusting and modifying it and changing it based on how this one friend reacted to it was so clarifying. And he was particularly the kind of person who just provided feedback naturally. Like, I sent him the first puzzle casually. Not like, “What do you think about this as a model for a new game and brand that I'll spend the next three years of my life focusing on?”, but as, like, “Here's a fun puzzle. Do you like this?”

And I think that was so crucial that it came about as something that I made for a friend and not as something that had a corporate plan behind it. But initially, it wasn't called Murdle and it wasn't a daily game because that trend hadn't really emerged yet. And it was through the sort of emergence of these sort of this genre that blew up of daily games that kind of made the clear connection to. It just seemed like such a perfect fit for this project.

I think initially the plan was that you would solve five in a row that would get progressively harder, and you could play those five. You could play a random five over and over again, but it would always be the same five-mystery story. And the realization that it would be better as a daily game was just really the final piece that clicked in and really shaped how the book was structured too. 

Now, obviously, you can do more than one a day, but it made me realize the value not in creating this kind of progressive ladder of puzzles, but in creating a singular experience of one puzzle that you could do over and over again. I think, as a writer, it was a key aspect when I was developing the book. I really wanted to make all of the puzzles build on each other, reference each other and for it to be one sort of unitary mega puzzle. And my editor at St. Martin's Press, Courtney Littler, who's a genius by the way, supervises the publication of the New York Times puzzle books.

She just had this awareness that people want to do the same puzzle that they are familiar with over and over again. Rather than try to build this progressive ladder of puzzle complexity, what we should try to do is create one really great puzzle experience that then we can provide over and over again.

And even though I think in practice, these two models don't seem that different, we still made a book where there's a storyline that runs through them all. They still do get harder, and they still do build on the techniques of previous puzzles, but the frameshift from one massive thing to one thing a hundred times was just so important in understanding how people actually engage with it.

That, I think, allowed it to be something that people would weave into their lives without consuming it, like, they would come up and say to me, “I do one every night before bed!” or, “You know, I do one on my lunch break.” And that, to me, is so rewarding versus all I ever do is sit here and solve these puzzles and I don't sleep well.

On scoping down and niching your product

There is a list of tips Kurt Vonnegut wrote tips for writers, and he says something about niches and stories, and he has a line in it. He's a brilliant writer, so he says it a lot better than I do. But he says something like, “If you try to open a window for your story, it'll catch a cold.” And it's sort of this idea that the wider audience you're trying to appeal to in your mind, the less specific the work ends up being.

I think there are a lot of people who write scripts when they're not the right person to write this script. The script is not the stories that they're interested in, but they have a fantasy that this will be the thing that blows up and wins them an Oscar and makes a billion dollars. And they start to write less for the people who are watching the movie and more for how they're gonna talk about it when they accept the Academy Award for best movie ever made.

I know that that happens to me. I write a thing, and I start to get really excited about how I'll be treated when people read this thing. And I think it's just so destructive to the experience of actually receiving the thing when you can feel that this writer is trying to make themselves sound cool. And I also think that another thing that I really kind of strangely benefited from is that I don't really obsess over puzzles. I'm not a puzzle fiend. The guy who I was making these puzzles for goes to an incredibly competitive trivia night once a week where everybody at the bar has won a game show. It's, like, the hardest trivia in Los Angeles. And those people make puzzles that hurt your brain.

And I think this happens whenever you're into something really deeply. You're like, people who really love whiskey. They want to drink the most disgusting beverage you've ever tasted. If you don't like whiskey, if you're not a drinker, you won’t get what they mean. People who love coffee don't like a mocha latte. They love sipping an espresso. You won’t get why they love the pure bitterness and etcetera.

And I think that sometimes that can be really alienating when you make stuff and you're like, “What do you think about this coffee?” And they're like, “It tastes bitter, it tastes horrible.” And you're like, “I know it's the best in the world.” And I think that that really benefited me because I came to it from the perspective of someone who wasn't so deep into it that I had lost the sense of the charm and joy of a neophyte.

Can we learn a bit more on the technical side of Murdle?

Yeah, I would love to. And I'm actually really excited to be on a game developer podcast and talking about this, because a lot of times, if I get into this with, like, a book interview, people just glaze over. But it is not dissimilar to a sudoku. Murdle is generated by MORIARTY, but really, I did not know how to generate puzzles when I started this. If I were to do it all over again, the architecture of a Murdle would probably be… the generation would probably function in a very different way.

So I'm just going to go through how the Murdle daily generator works, and I'll just kind of describe the steps of it, and I think I can go over it pretty quickly, and I'll speak to what I spent time working on.

So this is kind of inside baseball. You know, technical details. But basically what it does is it starts and randomly selects the suspects and weapons and locations. Now, the weapons and locations are taken from a very large data set of, like, megalocations, which each have weapons and sub-locations associated with them. All of this is handwritten, so to speak. So I would think of a location. I would think of ten different sub-locations that could be there, ten different weapons that could be found there, and I would just type this all up in an enormous spreadsheet. And the same thing happens with the suspects. I just have a large pool of suspects that I generated or wrote for the thing.

So every day, it randomly chooses a set of weapons, suspects and locations, and it uses a day and date as a random seed, and then everything is deterministically randomly generated from that seed. So when you visit murdle.com, your computer generates a Murdle individually.

Now, if I were to start it all over again, I'd probably do that server-side and just send out the puzzle to each person, because sometimes if someone's on, like, an old iPhone, it takes a long time to generate the puzzle. By the way, I don't have any inherent ability to maintain, like, a large archive of them because they are ephemerally generated every day based on the seed. And when I modify the program, ostensibly, you could pull up any previous puzzle. But when I modify the code, it changes not only today's puzzle but every puzzle in the future and every puzzle in the past.

So once it's chosen the weapons, suspects and locations, it then chooses who has what and where for all of them, and then it selects a murderer, and then it generates a random series of clues that accurately describe this circumstance. So it randomly selects things that are just true. So and so has such and such. Such and such is over there, or it'll include even either/ors. Either this is true or that's true, and it just creates a series of true statements about that puzzle.

And I found out about how many would be needed to come to a unique answer simply by trial and error, by doing it a thousand times. And then what it does after it's chosen a random set of statements, it then checks to see in every single possible arrangement of suspects, weapons and locations that this is a unique solution.

I had an intuition, which I have not mathematically proven, but I have found to be true from a couple of years of experience now, that if there were a single solution to the puzzle, then that solution would be logically reachable. Like, it's not necessarily true that you could have a sudoku with one solution and that people could naturally get to that solution through a logical process. Sometimes there are puzzles where there is only one solution, but there's a real gulf between what you've got and that answer. And you don't want to create a puzzle where there's a lot of random guessing and checking. You want there to be some sort of process that people can do as they work through it. Then it generates all the true statements. It checks through every possibility if there's only one solution.

And on Saturdays and Sundays, this is, I think, 12 million possibilities or something. So it sometimes takes a little computational legwork. And then once it's found that there's only one solution, it goes through all of the statements, and it tries to remove them one at a time. It removes each statement, and then it checks to see if there is still only one solution, because in early puzzles, they were frequently redundant clues

Aesthetically, nothing is gameplay-breaking about that but it's not that satisfying if the clues are repetitive. It also checks when it's creating these clues to make sure that the “killer clue”, which is the final clue that says where the crime was committed or what weapon it was committed with, MORIARTY makes sure that that weapon and that location aren't mentioned in any of the other clues, so you’ll have to do a couple of clues to solve the puzzle. Because, again, in the early puzzles, sometimes it'd be like, “Clue one, Dame Obsidian had the angry moose.” and then “Clue two, the angry moose, committed the crime.” And you'd be like, well, I've cracked this one.

And then once it's found all of the statements… Now, I should say what a statement is at this juncture in the code is not a full sentence, it is simply the logical arrangement. It's whether someone has something, what something, where something is, that sort of stuff. A brown-haired suspect was here, you know, a heavyweight weapon was there. Then it runs it through what took a huge amount of labor, which is basically just a long series of murder mystery-esque English language sentences that express those relationships in a kind of mad lib style.

So it'll plop the weapon of the suspect into places in those sentences. And this, I think, is really where the game kind of comes into itself. If the clues were just like, “Dame Obsidian had the angry moose”, I think it would get kind of boring. But because the clues are expressed in these various, like, evocatively mysterious ways, they add a level of interest. And then after that's done, some of the clues are taken and further codified. So, for example, there are little codes and ciphers, and those are added to it as a final step. Then it all displays for the user, and I think that that's pretty much it. I think that's the system. 

Now, it's more technically convoluted on the puzzles with liars, but it basically is the same process that it checks to make sure there's only one unique solution, and it reverse engineers the clues to match that single solution. 

I wish that I had done it in the way that a logical solver would do it, which is that it would create a clue and then deduce things from that clue because then I could have more control over the difficulty level of a particular puzzle. Whereas the current system creates solvable puzzles all the time, there's a range of difficulties that I can only check after the fact. When you said people are going to find it very interesting, I wanted to say, like, if you're making a randomly generated puzzle, if you actually teach the computer the logic of deductions versus my system of brute force testing, you will have more control over the ultimate difficulty level of the puzzle.

On being unable to solve his own puzzles

The fact that, like, when we were making the book, I realized at some point that I had completely lost the ability to solve these puzzles because all of the way that I thought about it was in this really computer way of solving it. Like, I just check every single possible solution and verify whether it's accurate. That's not how regular people solve them. And I think that's really weird.

I've never felt this phenomenon so strongly, which is present in all game designers, where, like, you see the code, they only see the output. But for this, it was doubly strange because the code that I'm seeing is actually, like, an alternative way to solve the puzzles that caused my actual way to solve the puzzles to atrophy. It’s like, when someone becomes very weak over time, like a muscle that you don't exercise. I feel like my ability to solve Murdles in a human way has atrophied.

And I also think this was a thing I said on lettuce climb. I watched a speed run of lettuce climb, and the guy was so much better at the game than I was. I felt at that time that that was what I considered a success in game development; which is that you spend so much time playing your game and you understand it so deeply that when the game comes out, you are the greatest player of this game that exists on Earth. I truly feel that I have been successful as a game developer when one person is better at the game than I am.

It is so astounding to see someone who didn't minutely tweak the physics of the head of lettuce for six months and has a deep understanding of what jumps can be made and what techniques can be done complete the game in that manner.

What are the main differences between the daily game and the book series of Murdle?

The biggest difference is that the books, being something I hand-made, so to speak, are robustly tested and balanced and each puzzle is very unique. But primarily, the difference is the story.

So there's a narrative that runs through each of the Murdle books, and the first one really tells this story between these two detectives, Detective Logico and Inspector Irritino. There’s a big crime that connects all of the cases and there are cliffhangers and there are recurring bits and characters that change over the course of the book. 

You know, a great way to have a story is to just have those descriptions of the characters change each time you encounter them. So one of the characters in the second book is a castaway who's taken off this island. And then every time she appears for the rest of the book, she's trying to find herself. So she has a different persona she's adopted.

And that experience of being able to play with a story over a course of a hundred puzzles is so rewarding to me, and I hope it's rewarding to people reading it to feel like they're really immersed in it. Whereas the daily puzzle is very much a daily activity, it's something that is much more akin, I would say, to doing a crossword or doing a daily sudoku. There is character to the daily puzzle, of course. There are interesting worlds and characters and locations, but you don't get the sense of a story. And that's actually something that I want to add more to the site. I want to add a more procedural story.

Further Murdle projects

I love procedural story generation, but I just finished the fourth adult Murdle and I just finished a Murdle Jr. for kids that's going to come out in October and November in the UK and the US, and we're going to have a series of Murdle Jr. novels for eight to twelve year olds where kid detectives solve crimes. And I have just been so overwhelmed with all these other things.

We've got a jigsaw puzzle that's going to be coming out. We've got a board game coming out pretty soon. And the one sort of regret I have with all of this… well, not really a regret, but something I feel like I need to be working more on, is the daily puzzle experience. And there's just something I love so fundamentally and deeply about making websites. Making a thing that is accessible everywhere in the world to any single person is something that I've always loved.

Making websites at a young age

When I was like 12 or 13, my father read an article about how people were buying domain names and creating websites. And he reserved a domain name for our family and was like, “Gregory, you got to create a website.” And I got into making websites at twelve, I think. And, you know, at the time, that was pretty cutting edge.

And now the open web is something that I think I have a real nostalgia for the internet before social media and the creation of apps. And I loved those random weird websites that you would discover, you know, in some far-forgotten corner of the internet. I love the time when you wanted to learn about a TV show that you liked, you wouldn't go to Wikipedia, you would go to some website called “Dave’s Seinfeld page”. You'd only have the information about Seinfeld that Dave had put together. I just so love that world of Geocities and individual hobbyist creators. 

That's something that's really important to me about Murdle. And I want to really sit down and spend two to three months really pouring 2.0 into the Murdle website and incorporating a lot of the stuff that I've learned from making these books into the site. Because right now it really functions in large part as a free sample for the Murdle books. And I want to make it a little more robust.

There's really something to figuring out how you can make something that works, that's self-contained, that's enjoyable, and then not spending an extra five years trying to make it the new World of Warcraft. I just had some friends who are great screenwriters, and they, over the pandemic, wanted to make a video game. And I was like, whatever your scope is, have it and then have it again. And then have it again. You want to create the smallest scope game you can possibly imagine. And, you know, within two weeks, they're like, trying to model the economy of the countries in their game. And I'm like, “You guys are just…. you're never gonna finish at this rate.”

What are the current statistics on Murdle?

I don't know the exact number of players, but I think we get about a million plays a month on the site. And that is varied and is downstream from the success of the books. So Christmas was huge in the UK. We were the number one book for Christmas last year.

And being the third non-British author to achieve number one is just unbelievable. Unbelievable. I am like the unanswerable third person in that trivia question. Like, if you ask someone, “Who are the three non-British authors that have had a British Christmas number one?” The other two are Michelle Obama and Dan Brown. And I feel like a wise trivia audience could perhaps guess those two. But ten years from now, mine's going to be a hard one to answer, I think. But, I mean, I don't know, maybe Murdle will be the most obvious answer of all. 

But it’s truly wild because I loved British mysteries as a kid, like Agatha Christie. I mean, there are so many wonderful worlds by many authors. But just that whole world of the manor house mysteries with the detectives and the aristocratic suspects... Murdle was really a love letter to that whole genre. And to see it succeed so well in the UK is such an honor. It's really overwhelming, too, because it's not like when you sell a book, they're like, “Well, how many followers do you have? Can you post about this a lot?” And I didn't really have a lot of followers. I didn't really have what they call a “platform”.

And so it really was the book itself that went out there and it did well. And it's so deeply flattering, and I feel more like a custodian of it than a creator. I think that my job now is to just try to take care of it as much as I can and honor this relationship that people have with it, rather than think of it as something that I'm making, so to speak. I think in like ten years I'll look back on this and I'll probably think like, oh, I wish I had enjoyed that more than working constantly, but I do love working constantly.

On getting over the addiction to analytics and retention

I also, in the very same way that I get addicted to games, get addicted to checking analytics. I have had times before when I've made web projects that the amount of time I spend working on it begins to be dwarfed by the amount of time I spend thinking about how to increase user retention or checking how many viewers are on right now. More than yesterday. Fewer than yesterday. Why is that? Oh, what should I change? And it's a sort of obsessive habit I try to suppress in myself because it doesn't lead to creative exploration, it leads to this sort of strange rumination on whatever numbers Google tells me.

When it starts out, it feels so good. Especially when you get a good day, you're like, “Ugh, the numbers are so good”. And then you get a bad day and you're like, “No! The numbers are so bad.” And at some point, it feels like you're stepping on a scale every morning. You're devastated if it's bad, and you're overjoyed if it's good. And it has nothing to do with your general enjoyment of life. It's like a metric that you've started to focus on. 

Again, I think that making something for a friend was such a better way for me to healthily work on something than trying to reverse engineer from analytics and data what the market would churn out.

Why is there no monetization on Murdle?

This gets in a little bit to that thing I was talking about with the allure of the old Internet, which is that websites used to not constantly be trying to trick you. And I mean, there were pop-ups and there were ads from the very beginning, but I've always wanted to make something that felt like it was innocent or pure in some sense. And I've always kind of felt like even putting a Google Ads banner at the top maybe eats away at that experience a little and makes it feel a little bit, you know, something that is trying to take advantage of you in a way.

I mean, I would never begrudge anybody running ads! And I think that I've been very fortunate with Murdle in that it is monetizable as a book, as a board game and as these other things that I've been able to think of the website as kind of a community hub, sort of a lost leader, so to speak. And it is something that I'm not super concerned about making sure that I get every penny off of it that I can.

I’ve been trying to only use it to promote Murdle, to promote the books, to promote the upcoming board game, you know, things like that. I think about it a lot like church. I don't really go to church now, but as a kid in Arkansas, I would go to Sunday school and you'd go to church afterward. And the preacher never tries to get you to donate to the church, right? They will be like, yeah, we're raising money for this mission, or we're trying to build a new building or whatever, but he never sells the time at the pulpit to do a business.

But yeah, I think maybe I’ll revisit this in a couple of years. When I start looking for the need to buy a new car or my car breaks down. If you see ads on the Murdle website, it’ll mean my car broke down or something.

Could you tell us your inspiration for the games and projects you’ve created?

Yeah, I think that something that has been really great about the games that I've made is that they usually come first from some non-game inspiration. So, like, for lettuce climb, I was writing these daily short kōans, and it was weirdly like, kind of a video game adaptation of that story. And I did a couple of those around that project.

And with Murdle, it was, you know, like, I love these Agatha Christie golden age mysteries. There's a guy, John Dickson Carr, who wrote maybe the greatest locked room mystery of all time. It's called the Three Coffins, sometimes released as the Hollow Man. And, you know, these old mysteries were games.

There's a Chesterton quote where he says, “Detective fiction is the grandest game in the world.” It's a challenge that you lay out for the reader, and then they solve it, hopefully, a few pages before the detective. And it's this real great experience of feeling like, you see how all the pieces snap into place. And I really loved that experience. And I used to love these logic puzzles as a kid. But the logic puzzles were always, like, the man in the blue hat drove a red car, the man in the green hat lived in a yellow house, and they were just so devoid of any kind of narratively interesting material.

In fact, there's a famous one that people call the Einstein puzzle, where I think you have to find out a person’s house, what car they drive, what brand of cigarettes they smoke, etcetera. And that just, I feel like, is the most hilarious, like, dated aspect of that puzzle. Like, it's so clearly from the 1950s, because it's a children's puzzle that wants you to figure out who smokes Camels.

But I think that taking those influences or inspirations that are outside the world of games is such a fundamental part of my process, I guess, where it's not that I play a game and I'm like, “I want to make this game because I love Stardew Valley!” On a side note, that's a guy who made that game by himself. And I could not imagine being able to make Stardew Valley alone. The complexity, the depth of that game. It's a different mind than I have. And I am much more of, like, a small projects kind of guy. And so I think something about being inspired by a book, a short story, a poem or another world and making a game out of that has, for me, produced more satisfying things than trying to make, like, my own version of Stardew Valley.

Or, like, what I was obsessed about as a kid was making a Zelda game on my calculator. And it's just like, you're never going to make a better Zelda than Zelda. It's tough. And if you are, you know that you are because you're someone whose whole life has been obsessed with Zelda and with that world. And then the game that you make channels everything that you've ever loved about it. 

And I would say that, to me, the key thing is, like, are you the best person in the world to make this thing? And it sounds kind of wildly egotistical to ever claim that you're the best person in the world to make a particular thing. But if you frame that in the right way, like, me making Murdle for my friend, like, nobody else was going to be able to make a murder mystery logic puzzle for my friend better. Like, I was so perfectly suited to make this for this one person. I'd read so many mysteries. I love puzzles, but I was also making it for someone who I knew and knew what they liked. And it was very different than trying to make the new commercial success project, which I think is so difficult and so random.

Where should we go to learn more about you and your work?

Yeah. So you can follow me on Instagram. But also just go to murdle.com, where you can play a daily murder mystery logic puzzle, and then my information is on that site. So if you want to, you know, cyberstalk me, you can start there.