Endless Thread - Digging Up Lily's Garden

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

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 Lily's Garden on Google Play "I hate Lily's Garden and her teeth" (PewDiePie, YouTube) How Tactile Games made marketing and diversity core to Lily’s Garden’s $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

Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. A recent episode explores the challenges and opportunities in decarbonizing one of the world's most carbon-intensive industries, ocean freight shipping. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Last summer, we sat down with a former colleague of ours to talk to her about something she loved. that we know almost nothing about. 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. 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. What do you like about them?

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. Way back in 2019, when Sandy was around 14 years old, there was a controversy in the mobile gaming world about a game called Lily's Garden. 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. You 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. And Luke, Lily's true love interest. He has shaggy brown hair and wears a tight gray t-shirt. 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 them lying next to each other in bed. Blaine looks proud of himself. Lily rolls her eyes. 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. 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. And that's not the only ad that's pretty soapy. One of the ads that really got everyone in a tizzy was the washing machine ad. This one takes place at a laundromat.

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

Yes. Cindy was not won over by these ads. Actually, she found them really annoying. 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. Yes. So I had that concern, and mostly just, Like, I don't want to be watching this. 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.

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, wait in. They keep sexualizing Lily, and I think it's despicable. It makes me angry. His video, I Hate Lily's Garden and her teeth, has more than 8 million views. Descendi, one of the strangest things about these ads, was how little they had to do with the actual game.

These ads are showing a narrative-style soap opera thing that does not align with what Lily's Garden actually is. Lily's Garden is what's known as a Match 3 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. 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. Seeing all of these incredibly gross ads really felt like a knife in the back. Gonzalo, the marketer. A relatable female protagonist. That was the key to Lily's Garden. And Merrill, the player. It involves like art theft, plant theft, a secret plant society, robot cats. I'm Ben Robot Kat Johnson.

I'm Amory. Definitely not growing eggplant Sievertson. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. And today, we're digging up Lily's Garden. So after seeing the ads, we wanted to see for ourselves. What is this game about? Okay, so I'm going to install it. 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. After the breakup, my world fell apart. Like, literally. 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. Then I heard my great Aunt Mary passed away and left me her entire fortune. So here I go. The gameplay begins. The animation becomes two-dimensional. The voiceover goes away, and it's replaced by a dialogue box.

Match two or more tiles at the same color to collect them. Yeah, but how do you collect them? Cheery music plays on loop in the background as you complete tasks like, like picking out a new mailbox. Let me see your mailbox. I'm too advanced for you. What do you mean? I moved on to bees.

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

how did you beat me? 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. 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. As much fun as I was having beating Ben. Oh, come on. 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.

My apartment is known among my friends and fans online as being extremely pink. 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. Stella is a key player in the story of Lily's Garden. I knew since one, since, God, I must have been eight or nine. 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 where everyone kind of made me believe that I was a lot better at art that I actually was. I picture the whole town like sending you off and waving their handkerchiefs. Yeah.

That's basically, I hope you remember the little people. 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. They said, we want a woman writing this because we're very serious about, you know, conveying, like, women's experiences and, you know, 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. 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, you know, market. 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. 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. 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, you know, 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.

To write Lily's Garden, Stella immersed herself in stories that women enjoyed outside of the gaming world. I watched a lot of like Gilmore Girls for this kind of like soapy light format, you know, small town type of thing. 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 drop-down menus, character, emotion, dialogue built to import directly into the game. Stella was also the game's narrative designer. 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. 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 certain. 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. 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 meat cute, because, spoiler, Lily falls for Luke. There is some drama. Luke is dealing with a custody battle for his daughter. And Lily's ex, Blaine, the blonde 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. 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. 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. 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. I wanted to convey a lot of the millennial female anxieties that I was also feeling at the time, you know, and often, often continue to feel, you know. And tapping into those anxieties means we can also tap into, like, you know, catharsis and, like, the wonderful feeling when things go better than you expect.

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. 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, and clearly she does have a good grasp on womanhood. You know, obviously, she's a woman. But, you know, I've tried very hard.

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, and my focus first and foremost is, you know, making stuff that speaks to women. And frankly, being in that cohort for as long as I have now, 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. After writing the 30-day arc that launched Lily's Garden, Stella left tactile and moved back to the States. And shortly after that, Stella saw the ads.

I would like to be very clear, I hate those ads. I hate them. More about how those ads came about in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. Neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey.

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Recruit new talent. new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. 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. 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.

The first ad, Stella remembers seeing, is the one where Lily fakes a positive pregnancy test to scare off Blaine. 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. Stella feels that the ads do not match the lily she wrote. 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, it really felt like a knife in the back. 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 slings. in.

After talking to Stella, we knew that the stories and the ads definitely were not in the game, at least at first. Were all of these ads just clickbait? Did the marketing team care about Lilly at all? Gonzalo Fasinella 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. And what definitely was not there is a relatable female 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, it was the deceit of what happened afterwards. 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. And the first ad we created was this one about pregnancy tests. So what we wanted was to lead it 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. 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.

What we ended up compromising, if you will, was that we created these Lillis 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. 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. 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. If Stella would have stayed, maybe the... that what we did in the marketing would have changed because Stella was, we would hear out still for sure. 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. Cindy wanted to know if the ads worked. And Gonzalo told us, hell yeah, they did. 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 plays, the amount of spend that they have in the game, everything kind of improves overnight when there's popularity to it. Gonsalo told us that the number of people who installed Lily's Garden after seeing an ad increased 20 times over. By the end of 2019, the year it debuted and that the ad started running, Lily's Garden was one of the top 100,

grossing mobile games in the world. To date, it is made more than $500 million. 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. Gensalo said he didn't feel like the ads were misleading because they were presented as Lily's daydreams, not Kams. 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 okay.

And there wasn't a strong regulation that said that you cannot do this and everybody was doing worst. So, yeah. Mobile game ads are mostly regulated by the platforms that sell them, Apple's App Store, or whatever you Android users use. It's the Google Play Store. All right. The Google Play Store. And it's used by the majority of the world.

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. What we tried to achieve was this type of humor as in Shrek, you know, that you would have, like, implicit things. Suggesting, 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. 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 is concerned about the... 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 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 U.S. 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 U.S. pointed out to us, there is no rule against ads being annoying.

Like Stella, Gonzalez 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. We didn't picture that perfect image of what a woman has to be. 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. 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. 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. They changed tactics. And eventually, Gonzalo left for a new job. But he still thinks about Lily.

And he's proud of that ad campaign. 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. I became incredibly curious through seeing those ads and just seeing people say that this game is so strange. When Meryl Verhoeven first heard about Lily's Garland, She had just graduated from high school. It was the summer of 2020, and her family was about to go on vacation.

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. 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? I am on level. Let's look again. 15,552 of Lily's Garden. Wow. Safe to say, in the six years since she first downloaded the game, Merrill has gone far beyond

the narrative that Stella wrote. 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 plot lines. And it's also absolutely absurd. I mean, it involves like art theft, plant theft, a secret plant society, FBI agents, like, robot cats. Just so much craziness.

I mean, yeah, it's great, but it's super silly. Like, it's absolutely absurd. 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. Both Stella and Gonzalo said they wanted Lily to be relatable. And for Merrill, she is.

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

In fact, she knows that better than most. Merrill just so happens to be getting her Ph.D. in neuroscience. And her research is focused on addiction. 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. Merrill 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. 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 Merrill, 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. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter.

It was hosted by me, Ben Brock Johnson. And me, Amory Severson. It was edited by Meg Crane. Mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikis. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Chiosna Bernadot, Kalyani Saxana, Emily Jankowski, and our managing producer, Summa to Joshi. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between an eggplant and an eggplant. If you have an online mystery, untold history, or other wild story from the internet,

you can email us, Endless Thread at WBUR.org.org. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? a podcast about the Morotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. Follow is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Valerie Thomas, Professor of Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech, on whether the ocean freight shipping industry can reach net zero emissions by 2050. It's technically feasible.

That's a very simple question. Will we get there? Will it all be deployed? We're going to see. I just want to add in there that, yeah, we've talked a lot about the difficulties for shipping in getting to net zero. This is not the only thing that's going to be going on. Aviation is seeking to do the same thing, maybe even faster, and the other uses of petroleum are all transitioning. You may think, and in some ways that makes the problem even bigger, there are other ways that it makes it easier.

Some of the fuels that are used for shipping are very similar to those used for aviation. So as infrastructure gets built out, shipping can benefit. Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken, wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more about the Morotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bu.bun.org.