What the dashboard will not tell you
Morphink has a page that draws four of your own numbers, week by week. It reports them and interprets none of them.
Your median time per word. Your longest chain. How many different words you have played. How close your Bridge games came to the shortest path.
The page does not congratulate you, and it will not tell you what any of it means about you. That is a decision, and it is the one we argued about most.
The category has a habit
Word games and puzzle games sell themselves on the mind. They train your brain, they sharpen your recall, they keep you mentally young. The claims are made confidently, in the store listing and on the loading screen, and they are mostly not supported by anything.
The honest state of the research is that getting better at a task makes you better at that task, and that the transfer to anything else is small, hard to demonstrate, and contested by the people who study it for a living. Whether a word game does anything for you beyond making you better at word games is a real open question, and it is not one a studio can settle by putting a sentence on a page.
Which leaves a straightforward choice. You can make the claim anyway, because it sells and nobody is checking. Or you can not.
What we did instead
Morphink exists to help people think more sharply. That is the ambition, it is why the game is built around retrieval under pressure and route-finding and long chains rather than around anagram scrambles, and we are not shy about it.
And we hold ourselves to a rule that came with it: the game has to demonstrate a benefit rather than merely claim one. So we talk about Morphink using your own numbers, and never with the sentence about your brain.
That is what the dashboard is. It is the mission surface, and its entire job is to hand you the evidence and then be quiet.
The four numbers, and why they are those four
Median time per word. How long it takes you to find a morph, in the middle of your run rather than at your best. The median rather than the average, because one thirty-second stare on a hard word would drag an average around and tell you about that word instead of about your week.
Longest chain. The deepest you got from a single starting word.
Distinct words played. How many different words you have ever put on the page. It only goes up, and it is the closest thing here to a measure of vocabulary.
Bridge optimality. How often you hit par. The copy says "across all bridges" and it means it: the puzzles vary in length and in difficulty, so this is a rate over an uneven set and it would be misleading to imply otherwise.
Four is a deliberate number. There is room for a dozen, and a dozen numbers is a page nobody reads and a page where you can always find one that went up.
A thin week looks thin
If you barely played in a given week, that week's point is drawn hollow instead of solid.
This is the small thing on the page we are proudest of. Three runs on a Tuesday do not tell you much about your median anything, and a chart that drew those three runs at full confidence would be inviting you to read a story into noise. The hollow point says: this is what we measured, and there was not much of it.
The two exact numbers get no such treatment. Your longest chain and your distinct word count are counts rather than estimates, and a count cannot mislead you about a small sample. It is what it is.
What is deliberately missing
No streak. There is no counter of consecutive days, because that number stops describing your play and starts driving it.
No comparison to other people. The dashboard is about you and contains nobody else. There are boards and duels elsewhere if you want a contest; this page is not one.
No red. Nothing on it is styled as a failure. A week where you played less is a week where you played less.
No interpretation. The page never tells you that you are improving, that you have plateaued, or that you should play more. It has the data to attempt all three and no business doing any of them.
No goals. You are not asked to set a target and then measured against it, because the number would stop being a measurement the moment it became a target.
What it costs us
This is a worse marketing surface than the alternative and we know it.
"Your recall improved 23% this month" is a screenshot people post. "Your median morph is 0.8s faster than four weeks ago" is a smaller sentence, and it has the disadvantage of being checkable.
We would rather have the smaller sentence. Every studio in this category can say the big one, and none of them can show you why they believe it. If your numbers move here, they moved. If they did not, the page will say so.
Your numbers are yours
They are on your device. There is no account, and nothing about how you play leaves your phone unless you go and ask for it.
So the page is genuinely only for you. It is not a report we are reading over your shoulder, it is not tuned to make you feel a particular way, and it will never send you a message about itself.
If they move, you will see it. What it means is yours to decide.