Which of the following interactive features drove record traffic to its respective news sites in recent months: a) How Much Time Have You Wasted on Facebook? for Time; b) The interactive dialect quiz for The New York Times; c) The Adele Dazeem Generator: Travoltify Your Name, which appeared on Slate; or d) all of the above?

Congratulations if you answered d) all of the above.

News organizations are changing their formats in the digital age, with quizzes and games having become popular offerings that audiences find hard to resist.

The Facebook quiz helped lead Time to its highest Internet traffic day ever, 3.8 million unique visitors in January. The dialect quiz, which appeared in December, was the most viewed and most emailed article last year for The New York Times. And the Adele Dazeem name generator, which Slate put up Monday after John Travolta mangled the introduction of the singer Idina Menzel at the Oscars ceremony, calling her Adele Dazeem, was the most viewed article ever in Slate’s 18-year history.

The feature, which allows readers to enter their name and find out how John Travolta might mispronounce it, had been viewed by 9.5 million unique users by Wednesday afternoon and was adding roughly 100,000 people an hour.

At first Slate’s editor, David Plotz, was not sure this development was an entirely good thing: “Definition of ambivalent: The John Travolta name generator is the most popular story in Slate history,” he posted on Twitter. Later in a phone interview, he said “bemused” was a better description of his feelings.

“Readers will go high or low with us,” he said. “It was off the news and it was fun and shareable. All publications are aspiring to that direct connection to their audience.”

And whether they like it or not, in these tough times news organizations are prepared to take advantage of a strategy that allows them to charge more for advertising — rates are based on monthly visitors to the site — and to potentially attract new readers who might become loyal followers.

“It is the gamification of content,” said Joshua Benton, director of the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard. “Take the same dynamics that lead games and social sharing to be addictive and use them in way to connect to content.”

Games have been part of the newspaper business for a long time. The New York Times has featured its crossword puzzle since 1942, while other newspapers have carried comics, word puzzles and acrostics. But the digital age has allowed for interactivity, which makes for an especially alluring form of game-playing. If users can put their own name and information into a template and come out with an amusing answer, it often prompts them to share it with others through social media, contributing to the holy grail of virality.

While such amusements are not new, the trend toward interactivity is only accelerating. Time magazine hired its first digital interactive graphics editor last August. The Wire, part of Atlantic Media, has introduced a custom-made bracket competition to coincide with March Madness, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, where users vote to narrow the field in categories like the best college, the best city, the best seat in a movie theater.

The problem for media organizations is where, if anywhere, to draw the line between amusing content and the mission of reporting the news. Many digital publications have relied on addictively shared content of dubious news value — like quizzes to determine which character of the Downton Abbey television series the user most resembles.

Plotz of Slate says that as long as his magazine runs serious journalism alongside the name generators and other interactive tools, he sees no reason to worry. He pointed out that before Travoltify Your Name was posted, an 18,000-word article about the woman Ronald Reagan made famous by calling her the welfare queen had been getting the most attention.

“We will do anything that is interesting, journalistically worthy,” Plotz said. “Travolta is explosive, but we published 50 other articles that day, including one on the Crimean Tatars. If we had a great idea we’d do another interactive today and tomorrow.”