Those games were spotted in testing a few months back, especially during March. So, here is LinkedIn's official unveiling of its new in-stream games meant to give LinkedIn users respite from their workday grind.
The video clip says that LinkedIn's new puzzle games are a stress relief moment for professionals and of course, as designed, and could help LinkedIn boost its in-app engagement.
Here's what LinkedIn has to say:

Our goal on LinkedIn is to be able to regularly find ways to connect professionals in order to keep them updated and continue connecting. That's why, starting today we're incorporating thinking games directly into the LinkedIn experience. We'd like to enable people to have their brain exercised as they take a brief pause, but we'd also like to provide people with reasons to stay connected with others". We hope that these games inspire banter, conversation, and even a healthy dose of competition among professionals around the world. "

LinkedIn is debuting three in-stream games to begin with:

Pinpoint is a word association game: "There's five words inside a grid, and your objective is to guess what common category all the words belong to.".
Queens is the logic game, where one has to put a queen in the grid so that there is only one queen in every row, column and region.
Crossclimb is the trivia game : "Think of it as a crossword and a word ladder.".
Each game will have one edition daily so won't take a heap of your time, with scores and performance stats on a scoreboard that'll enable comparative performance between connections, companies, schools, etc.
Which is indeed a little at odds, and really, quite overtly an attempt to increase time spent in the app. But you can also see how it will probably have the effect of increasing engagement and will give people another way of competitive diversion during the workday.
The closest comparison could be Worldle, which, by peak, engaged millions of participants in its daily contest. HQ Trivia is another instance of another popular, short-term puzzle game replete with a heap of attention, and it's where LinkedIn seems to be looking with this new element.

And at the very least, you can picture that quite a few people will likely give these puzzle games a shot, and with cross-company ranking, there will be employees that feel an allegiance to their employer, and a compulsion to participate.

Being such, experimentation with games on LinkedIn makes sense. And while a bit off-topic, it will also serve as another way to enhance its already "record levels of engagement."

I mean, I would still ask if that really aligns with the platform's bigger mission of "connecting the world's professionals to economic opportunity."

But as long as the engagement numbers keep going up, all is well and good. Right?