Digging Up Lily's Garden

A woman sitting blissfully on a vibrating laundromat dryer. A faked pregnancy test to dump a bad boyfriend. In 2019, the internet was abuzz about bizarre ads for a mobile game called Lily's Garden. The ads were only about 15 seconds each, but they evoked a whole universe of drama amongst a cast of zany characters that inspired countless YouTube videos and copious internet chatter. The thing is... the story in the ads had almost nothing to do with the story in the game. In this episode of Endless Thread: creative differences, the wilderness of mobile games, and where the Lily's Garden game-world and the ad-world diverged. Show notes: Lily's Garden on the App Store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lilys-garden-design-relax/id1363727973 Lily's Garden on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tactile.lilysgarden "I hate Lily's Garden and her teeth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS3A6FQzEuQ" (PewDiePie, YouTube) How Tactile Games made marketing and diversity core to Lily’s Garden’s $500 million success https://www.pocketgamer.biz/how-tactile-games-made-marketing-and-diversity-core-to-lilys-gardens-500-million-success/ (Pocket Gamer) This episode was produced and written by Grace Tatter, co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, and edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. Special thanks to our 2025 Bloomberg Arts Intern Cendy Charles. *** Sponsor message: INCOGNI: Take back your personal data with Incogni! Use code ENDLESS at the link below and get 60% off annual plans: https://incogni.com/ENDLESS

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:32Amory Sivertson?

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at linkedin.com/smallbusiness.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Last summer, we sat down with a former colleague of ours to talk to her about something she loves that we know almost nothing about.

• 1:22Speaker 05

  I've been playing mobile games since I was a kid. I would play those games every moment when I was not at school, when I was at home, just every moment that I wasn't doing something.

• 1:34Amory Sivertson?

  That's Cindy Charles. She's a junior at Emerson College, and she still loves mobile games, you know, like Candy Crush, Angry Birds, games you can download on your smartphone, often for free, and play anytime, anywhere.

• 1:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  What do you like about them?

• 1:50Speaker 05

  I think I just like that there's no stakes with mobile games. It's almost entirely a leisure activity. Some people take it really seriously, but the majority of people do not care.

• 2:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Way back in 2019, when Cindy was around 14 years old, there was a controversy in the mobile gaming world about a game called Lily's Garden.

• 2:20Amory Sivertson?

  Really, the controversy was about the ads for Lily's garden. Strange little vignettes, told in just 15 seconds. They have a consistent cast of characters, rendered in 3D animation. Think Pixar, but lower budget. You've got Lily, our protagonist, bespectacled and wearing a pink plaid shirt.

• 2:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  You've got her boyfriend, Blaine, who's blonde and has a big chin like a chad and a big ego. For all intents and purposes, the villain.

• 2:50Amory Sivertson?

  And Luke, Lily's true love interest. He has shaggy brown hair and wears a tight gray t-shirt.

• 2:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  This cast interacts wordlessly against plunky music. In one ad, we see Lily kissing Blaine, the blonde guy. We see a clock tick for just a few seconds. It cuts to them lying next to each other in bed. Blaine looks proud of himself. Lily rolls her eyes.

• 3:15Amory Sivertson?

  In another ad, Lily nods her head toward Blaine and holds her fingers out to suggest the size of something small. Then she gestures at Luke and puts her hands out to suggest he has something big. Turns out, they both entered an eggplant-growing competition, which is about as close as these ads come to referencing a garden.

• 3:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  The ads also bring the drama. Lily shows Blaine, blonde jerk, a pregnancy test. He panics and rides off on his motorcycle. She cries until he's totally out of sight. And then she smiles and erases a line from the test. She faked it to get rid of him.

• 4:01Amory Sivertson?

  And that's not the only ad that's pretty soapy.

• 4:05Speaker 05

  One of the ads that really got everyone in a tizzy was the washing machine ad.

• 4:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  This one takes place at a laundromat.

• 4:19Speaker 05

  Lily goes first. She sits on a dryer or washer and then she kind of like experiences bliss or whatever. And then she brings her friends wine and candles and they all sit on dryers and have a time. And that got a lot of people's attention on the internet because it was just really strange.

• 4:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Not to be too direct about it, but what you're talking about is this, this is like a pretty sexually suggestive ad, right?

• 4:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:54Amory Sivertson?

  Cindy was not won over by these ads. Actually, she found them really annoying.

• 4:59Speaker 05

  They didn't pull me in the way that I think they were supposed to. They annoyed me the way that I think they also were intended to do, where it feels like you're watching an episode of a show you didn't sign up for. And I thought it was a bit inappropriate. Like, I know that there are younger people who watch these, or younger people who play these games, because mobile games, for the most part, are for all ages.

• 5:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 5:26Speaker 05

  So I had that concern and mostly was just like, I don't want to be watching this.

• 5:31Amory Sivertson?

  If you play mobile games, you know the ads can be relentless. They pop up every few minutes while you're playing, especially if you're playing a game's free version.

• 5:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  A lot of times, players just, you know, zone out during the ads, waiting until they can play their game again. But these ads were getting attention. Even PewDiePie, one of the most viewed YouTubers of all time, weighed in.

• 5:54Speaker 06

  They keep sexualizing Lily and I think it's despicable. It makes me angry.

• 5:59Amory Sivertson?

  His video, "I Hate Lily's Garden and Her Teeth," has more than 8 million views.

• 6:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  To Cindy, one of the strangest things about these ads was how little they had to do with the actual game.

• 6:11Speaker 05

  These ads are showing a narrative-style soap opera thing that does not align with what Lily's Garden actually is.

• 6:23Amory Sivertson?

  Lily's Garden is what's known as a match three puzzle game, which means that players are presented with a grid of colorful tiles. And then the object is to connect three tiles of the same color. It's kind of like tic tac toe. There's not a ton of strategy involved or necessarily a story.

• 6:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  When Cindy wrapped up her time at WBUR and went back to school, she left us with some questions. Could we find out what the heck was up with these ads? Were they supposed to be annoying? Did they have anything to do with the game at all? Did they even work? To answer these questions, we had to talk to our own cast of characters. Stella, the writer.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Seeing all of these incredibly gross ads really felt like a knife in the back.

• 7:09Amory Sivertson?

  Gonzalo, the marketer.

• 7:11Speaker 06

  A relatable female protagonist. That was the key to Lily's Garden.

• 7:17Amory Sivertson?

  And Merrill, the player.

• 7:19Speaker 07

  It involves like art theft, plant theft, a secret plant society, robot cats.

• 7:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben "Robot Cat" Johnson.

• 7:32Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory "Definitely Not Growing Eggplant" Sivertson.

• 7:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR.

• 7:40Amory Sivertson?

  And today, we're digging up Lily's Garden.

• 7:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  So after seeing the ads, we wanted to see for ourselves. What is this game about? OK, so I'm going to install it.

• 8:00Amory Sivertson?

  I'm getting the whole narrative. Here, Lily went through a breakup. When you open up the Lily's Garden app for the first time, you're served up a little video in that same 3D animation style from the ads. You see Lily crying on her couch, deleting a photo of her and Blaine, the blonde guy from the ads. Her phone screen is cracked. You hear her voiceover.

• 8:24Speaker 07

  After the breakup, my world fell apart, like literally.

• 8:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Her ceiling caves in. You see her drop her keys into a storm drain. Then she gets caught in a storm. She is dripping wet.

• 8:38Speaker 07

  Then I heard my great aunt Mary passed away and left me her entire fortune. So here I go.

• 8:49Amory Sivertson?

  The gameplay begins. The animation becomes two dimensional. The voiceover goes away and it's replaced by a dialogue box.

• 8:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Match two or more tiles of the same color to collect them.

• 9:00Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, but how do you, how do you collect them? Cheery music plays on loop in the background as you complete tasks like picking out a new mailbox.

• 9:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Let me see your mailbox.

• 9:10Amory Sivertson?

  I'm too advanced for you.

• 9:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  What do you mean?

• 9:13Amory Sivertson?

  I moved on to bees.

• 9:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  We didn't play for long, but we, or at least one of us, was invested.

• 9:21Amory Sivertson?

  Oh my God, oh my God, everything's blowing up. All goals complete. I feel like I'm doing everything wrong and it's still like-

• 9:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  How did you beat me?

• 9:27Amory Sivertson?

  Great job. Here's the thing, I don't know what I'm doing, but as long as I'm beating you, this is a great game.

• 9:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  The game didn't seem like the ads at all, at least not so far. We didn't see any affairs or pregnancy tests or vibrating dryers. The garden looks like a painted illustration from a children's picture book. Lily seems singularly focused on making it look nice, which somehow involves us doing a bunch of match three puzzles.

• 10:01Amory Sivertson?

  As much fun as I was having beating Ben-

• 10:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, come on.

• 10:04Amory Sivertson?

  We had to bail before we got too far into the story. Actually, we didn't even get far enough to know there was a real story.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  My apartment is known among my friends and fans online as being extremely pink.

• 10:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Thankfully, we'd scheduled an interview with Stella Sacco. She talked to us from her queen's apartment, which indeed has pink walls, a pink couch, and shelves laden with plush pink peeps bunnies.

• 10:30Amory Sivertson?

  Stella is a key player in the story of Lily's garden.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  I knew since when, uh, since, God, I must have been eight or nine, um, that I wanted to work in games, but for the longest time, I thought I wanted to be an artist for games. You know, do concept and, you know, character art and stuff like that. And I grew up in a very small town, um, where everyone kind of made me believe that I was a lot better at art than I actually was.

• 10:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  I picture the whole town like sending you off and waving their handkerchiefs and-

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's basically- I hope you remember the little people.

• 11:10Amory Sivertson?

  Instead of being an artist, Stella found her way into the world of mobile gaming. And that's how she got a poem assignment from the Danish developer Tactile Games to write the story and design the narrative for Lily's Garden.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  They said, "We want a woman writing this because we're very serious about conveying women's experiences and making something that women will actually want to play." Because, especially back then, games for women, like games nominally designed for and marketed toward women, were functionally indistinguishable from children's games.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  They called it pink, pink games. Everything had to be pink. Everything had to be cute, and the game had to talk to you like you were five years old, despite the fact that women 35-plus are the bread and butter of this particular market.

• 12:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Industry groups estimate that women account for at least half of mobile game players around the world. And most of these mobile game-playing women are above the age of 35.

• 12:15Amory Sivertson?

  They spend more time playing than men and are more likely to make in-app purchases. So of course, gaming companies want their attention. But to Stella, pink, pink, pink was not it.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Now, that isn't to say that that aesthetic can't appeal to people. God knows, the room I'm in right now, my living room, very pink, very cute. But also, the hook for me personally, for working on this game and for having to move to Denmark to do it, was that they were actually looking at other stuff that women were watching and reading and playing in their normal, everyday life.

• 12:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  To write Lily's Garden, Stella immersed herself in stories that women enjoyed outside of the gaming world.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  I watched a lot of Gilmore Girls for this kind of soapy, light format, small-town type of thing.

• 13:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Then she wrote the story, which isn't as straightforward as just opening up a Google Doc and letting it rip. It is spreadsheets with dropdown menus, character, emotion, dialogue, built to import directly into the game.

• 13:29Amory Sivertson?

  Stella was also the game's narrative designer.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  That means I work with the character and scene artists to make sure that, you know, everything matches to what we're trying to make.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  I work with the musicians. I work with other writers on the game. If I find something incongruous as I'm playing, or something that doesn't really vibe with what I've written, or what we've said is a, you know, a narrative pillar for the game, then I can speak up and say, I don't think this is really serving us.

• 14:02Amory Sivertson?

  If we had kept playing for more than three minutes, we would have gotten more of a full story. Remember, Lily's inherited this garden from her Aunt Mary. After you pick out a mailbox, I guess, Aunt Mary's lawyer tells Lily that the will has a special condition. Lily has to restore the property to its former glory in 30 days.

• 14:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Dun, dun, dun. Lily is stressed out about meeting this deadline. Oh, man, I can relate, Lily. And so she's annoyed when her neighbor Luke, the other guy from the ads, the one with the brown hair and the tight t-shirt, is playing the banjo badly on the roof in the middle of the night. This is their meet cute, because spoiler, Lily falls for Luke.

• 14:47Amory Sivertson?

  There is some drama. Luke is dealing with a custody battle for his daughter. And Lily's ex, Blaine, the blond guy with the chin, keeps trying to win her back, even though he cheated on her. Her estranged mom drops in unannounced. There are no voiceovers. The dialogue pops up on the screen. In between scenes, you do some puzzles. You get to decide what order Lily does her tasks in, but you have no control over the plot.

• 15:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  The tone is lighter than the ads, more optimistic. Even Blaine develops as a character. He finds a new love, realizes his true passion in life is not to work in finance. But to become a clown.

• 15:27Amory Sivertson?

  Stella concluded Lily's story at the end of those first 30 days in the game, Lily's deadline for cleaning up the garden so she can collect her inheritance. If it were a TV show, this would be the end of season one. Lily gets her inheritance, although she discovers a whole second property that needs tending to.

• 15:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  In a burst of finale energy, Lily and Luke share their first kiss. In the story that Stella wrote, that's as raunchy as it gets.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  I wanted to convey a lot of the millennial female anxieties that I was also feeling at the time, you know, and often, often, often continue to feel, you know? And tapping into those anxieties means we can also tap into like, you know, uh, you know, catharsis and like the wonderful feeling when things go better than you expect.

• 16:23Amory Sivertson?

  Stella's life was changing a lot as she wrote Lily's story. She had just come out as trans. In fact, Stella had changed her name, pronouns, and picture on LinkedIn just days before Tactile Games reached out with the opportunity.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  You know, navigating the world as an out-trans woman is very different than navigating it as a man. And some people will look at that and say, oh, well, you know, if a trans woman wrote this, then clearly she does have a good grasp on womanhood. You know, obviously she's a woman. Um, but, um, you know, I, I've tried very hard not to put my identity as the center of who I am in my work and sort of in my, you know, public and professional life. Like, I like to think of myself as a woman who happens to be trans, you know? Um, and my focus first and foremost is, you know, making stuff that speaks to, to women.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  And frankly, being in that cohort for as long as I have now, um, just makes me feel stronger about the work, you know? Feel more connected to it, making sure that what I'm writing is resonant with all kinds of other women and not women who are just, you know, like me.

• 17:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  After writing the 30-day arc that launched Lily's Garden, Stella left Tactile and moved back to the States.

• 17:48Amory Sivertson?

  And shortly after that, Stella saw the ads.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  I would like to be very clear, I hate those ads. I hate them.

• 17:56Amory Sivertson?

  More about how those ads came about in a minute.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 18:29Speaker 06

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts, and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 18:56Amory Sivertson?

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness. Stella hated the Lily's Garden ads, but she was already back in the United States, no longer working with Tactile, and advertising had never been her area of expertise.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  As a writer, I understand that my job is very different than the people whose job it is to get other people to play the game, right? Like, there's a reason I'm not in marketing.

• 19:50Amory Sivertson?

  The first ad Stella remembers seeing is the one where Lily fakes a positive pregnancy test to scare off Blaine.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  I did not like that one, not only because it was not actually a story that was in the game at all, but also was just very mean spirited in a way that the rest of the game is not, and that I very purposely, you know, avoided putting that kind of like mean spirited stuff in. You know, marketing was essentially creating like this gigantic cohort of people who were either hoping for the game to be trashy and/or would be surprised when it wasn't.

• 20:29Amory Sivertson?

  Stella feels that the ads do not match the Lily she wrote.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  Seeing all of these incredibly gross ads with like, you know, characters jerking off and characters drugging, drugging each other and, you know, Lily making gestures indicating how well endowed the other male characters are, like, really felt like a knife in the back.

• 20:54Amory Sivertson?

  The drugging ad, by the way, features Blaine and Lily's mom on a date. They both seem to slip something into each other's drinks. The drinks change color, and then they clink glasses. It's not clear from the ad what they slipped in.

• 21:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  After talking to Stella, we knew that the stories in the ads definitely were not in the game, at least at first.

• 21:18Amory Sivertson?

  Were all of these ads just clickbait? Did the marketing team care about Lily at all?

• 21:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Gonzalo Fasenella was the chief marketing officer at Tactile when Lily's Garden was created. And like Stella, Gonzalo was interested in working on a game that was for adult women and that was marketed in a grown-up way. Also, there weren't any other mobile games on the market at the time that were so focused on story.

• 21:44Speaker 06

  And what definitely was not there is a relatable female.

• 21:50Speaker 06

  Protagonist. And that was the key to Lily's Garden. Not the fact that it was a female character, but that it was relatable. And that was the originality that we put with Lily, that, in my opinion, was the seed of what happened afterwards.

• 22:08Amory Sivertson?

  According to Gonzalo, what he and his team were trying to do was take some of what was special about the game and make it really grabby.

• 22:17Speaker 06

  And the first ad we created was this one about a pregnancy test. So what we wanted was to Lily to create the situation because the guy was a little bit of a jerk. So she couldn't get rid of him. And she did that to get rid of him. And then, you know, we started to, that went crazy.

• 22:39Amory Sivertson?

  The ad campaign was born. Gonzalo would have liked some of the story arcs from the ads to make it into the game. But he told us it was too complicated for the developers. So the marketing team came up with something else.

• 22:52Speaker 06

  What we ended up compromising, if you will, was that we created these Lily's Garden daydreams to justify the fact that the marketing story would move to whatever we wanted without having to follow the story as the story was developing.

• 23:09Amory Sivertson?

  That's how Gonzalo explains the ads being so, so different from the world in the game. They're all in Lily's imagination. It's her subconscious coming up with some wacky stuff. In that context, they almost make sense.

• 23:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  In Gonzalo's mind, the stories were in keeping with what Stella wrote. A little soapy, but in his eyes, not too over the top.

• 23:33Speaker 06

  If Stella would have stayed, maybe what we did in the marketing would have changed because Stella was, we would hear of Stella for sure.

• 23:41Amory Sivertson?

  Gonzalo knows the ads are provocative. That was the point. They got people talking, including some of the most popular YouTubers of all time. And that led people to playing the game.

• 23:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Cindy wanted to know if the ads worked. And Gonzalo told us, hell, yeah, they did.

• 23:59Speaker 06

  When you can crack something like that on the marketing side, everything improves in the game. The amount of people playing, the time that people play, the amount of spend that they have in the game, everything kind of improves overnight when there's popularity to it.

• 24:20Amory Sivertson?

  Gonsalo told us that the number of people who installed Lily's Garden after seeing an ad increased 20 times over.

• 24:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  By the end of 2019, the year it debuted and that the ads started running, Lily's Garden was one of the top 100 grossing mobile games in the world. To date, it has made more than $500 million.

• 24:46Amory Sivertson?

  If there was a market of women who wanted content that was more adult than Candy Crush, the ads spoke to that, and they were so bizarre. It's not hard to imagine being curious enough to download the game just to see what was going on. Gonsalo said he didn't feel like the ads were misleading because they were presented as Lily's daydreams, not canon.

• 25:08Speaker 06

  We're not going to mislead anybody, but we're going to embellish our stories. And that's where we decided to draw it, and maybe it was, you know, based on our own morale. But we thought that in the context of what was happening at the time, it was OK. And there wasn't a strong regulation that said that you cannot do this, and everybody was doing worst. So, yeah.

• 25:34Amory Sivertson?

  Mobile game ads are mostly regulated by the platforms that sell them, Apple's App Store, or whatever you Android users use.

• 25:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's the Google Play Store, and it's used by the majority of the world.

• 25:47Amory Sivertson?

  Congratulations. And while those platforms have rules about sexually explicit material, graphic violence, or hate speech, there's nothing here that would necessarily cross those lines. The sex in the ads is always implied.

• 26:02Speaker 06

  What we tried to achieve was this type of humor as in Shrek, you know, that you would have like implicit...

• 26:10Speaker 06

  Things that suggest you and suggesting, you know, and without implying things not to make it that a kid cannot watch it. Of course, some of the ads might, you know, have that, you know, have maybe went over that. I'm not saying that it was perfect, but for the majority of them, I feel that they were okay.

• 26:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Of course, this is really subjective. Let's go back to one of the things that got us digging in Lily's garden in the first place. Our former colleague Cindy, who was concerned about the sexual content of the Lily's Garden ads that she was seeing when she was around 14 years old and that even younger kids might be seeing too. As a parent, this stuck with me. I can decide what kind of games are appropriate for my kids to play online, but I can't control the ads those games serve up. TV, for example, also doesn't let the viewer control the ads, but in TV you have different channels with different advertising standards. So you can reasonably expect to know what the vibe of a certain channel is and the kind

• 27:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  of ads your kid is going to see. In the digital world, that feels less clear. I still have control, but it requires me as a consumer to deep dive into settings instead of just saying, you can watch this channel, not that one. There are government regulations in the US and EU that prevent misleading ads, but they're more focused on hidden costs or whether an app actually works. And as one legal expert in the US pointed out to us, there is no rule against ads being annoying.

• 27:53Amory Sivertson?

  Like Stella, Gonzalo seemed to have a clear idea of Lily, almost as if she were a real person. To him, the ads were true to that vision.

• 28:03Speaker 06

  We didn't picture that perfect image of what a woman has to be, you know? And I think that, sure, maybe you didn't like the choices from Lily and what we made Lily do because it might not be in your personality, but Lily didn't give a fuck.

• 28:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  The marketing team, however, did give a flip about whether the ads worked and attracted new players. After a few months, the shock value started to wear off.

• 28:30Speaker 06

  It's hard to run the same type of strategy for a very long time, so we had to adapt that to show a little bit more gameplay. So that happens only after six months.

• 28:40Amory Sivertson?

  They changed tactics, and eventually Gonsalo left for a new job. But he still thinks about Lily, and he's proud of that ad campaign.

• 28:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  We've gotten two very different perspectives on these ads from people who worked on Lily's Garden. But we kept thinking about the people who saw the ads and thought, yes, I want to play that game, only to find it was very different.

• 29:03Speaker 07

  I became incredibly curious through seeing those ads and through just seeing people say that this game is so strange.

• 29:09Amory Sivertson?

  When Merrill Verhoeven first heard about Lily's Garden, she had just graduated from high school. It was the summer of 2020, and her family was about to go on vacation.

• 29:19Speaker 07

  So I decided to give it a download just ahead of my trip. And I was immediately like pretty intrigued by it because it's very entertaining.

• 29:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  So the ads brought Merrill to the gates of Lily's Garden, but she wasn't deterred when the game was something different. And what level are you on?

• 29:35Speaker 07

  I am on level, let's look again, 15,552 of Lily's Garden.

• 29:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 29:43Amory Sivertson?

  Safe to say, in the six years since she first downloaded the game, Merrill has gone far beyond the narrative that Stella wrote.

• 29:51Speaker 07

  The story is endless. Like, I'm sure they could continue on as long as they wanted to. They're very good at adding other characters in and giving them secondary plotlines. And it's also absolutely absurd. I mean, it involves like art theft, plant theft, a secret plant society, FBI agents, like robot cats.

• 30:15Speaker 07

  Just so much craziness. I mean, yeah, it's great, but it's super silly. Like, it's absolutely absurd.

• 30:21Amory Sivertson?

  Despite the escalating hijinks, the core of the story Stella wrote is still playing out. Lily is still together with Luke. They co-parent his daughter with his ex.

• 30:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Both Stella and Gonsalo said they wanted Lily to be relatable. And for Meryl, she is.

• 30:38Speaker 07

  She's very kind. She's very accepting. There's a character in the game who like very openly identifies as autistic, and I'm also autistic. And so watching Lily develop a relationship with her and be considerate of her, I really enjoyed that. I've also had my share of terrible partners and have found a really good partner who I'm still with. And so it's also kind of nice to watch her finally get treated well and be in a good relationship. I get some satisfaction out of that.

• 31:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Meryl knows that at the end of the day, the goal is to get players like her to spend money.

• 31:16Amory Sivertson?

  In fact, she knows that better than most. Meryl just so happens to be getting her PhD in neuroscience, and her research is focused on addiction.

• 31:26Speaker 07

  The game is designed to be very addictive. It's designed to, you know, provide a dopamine hit. And they have so many of the classic gamification things like leaderboards, competing against other people, challenges. And I think what's been really impressive to me is even though I understand all of that and I understand the cycle of addiction and dopamine and all of that, it's worked on me super well.

• 31:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Meryl has banned herself from making in-app purchases, but she still plays the game every day, nearly six years after first seeing those crazy ads.

• 31:57Amory Sivertson?

  Gonsalo and the marketing team's ads for Lily's garden were not what Stella, the game's writer, would have wanted for her creation. But they did bring in players like Meryl, who might have come for the washing machines and the love triangle, but who stayed long enough to get to know a version of Lily that Stella might be proud of. A woman who's gradually growing an interesting life for herself. One eggplant or robot cat at a time.

• 32:44Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter.

• 32:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  It was hosted by me, Ben Brock Johnson.

• 32:52Amory Sivertson?

  And me, Amory Sivertson. It was edited by Meg Kramer. Mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikes.

• 32:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Chiosna Bernado, Kalyani Saksana, Emily Jankowski, and our managing producer, Suma Tajoshi.

• 33:07Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between an eggplant and an eggplant.

• 33:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you have an online mystery, untold history, or other wild story from the internet, you can email us [email protected].

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, executive director of the Just Horizons Alliance on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 33:57Speaker 05

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 34:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 34:04Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities. For example, speakers of different languages. There are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 34:53Amory Sivertson?

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m.

• 35:02Amory Sivertson?

  We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness. Now streaming on Paramount+. I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you. You're having a midlife crisis. I'm not ready for this. He's back. I'm older. I'm wiser.

• 35:39Amory Sivertson?

  And sharper than ever. Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything. Dexter: Resurrection. New season now streaming on the Paramount+ Premium Plan.