Whether you’ve heard your friends talk about it or if you’ve seen the gray, green and yellow squares on Twitter, or have participated in the daily challenge — Wordle is becoming part of people’s routine and it is not going away. Still, the few of us that haven’t hopped into the Wordle wagon wonder, why the hype? Wordle is an online, puzzle-like game that challenges players to figure out a mystery word every day. The site does a great job at explaining the tricky rules:
Players get six chances to guess the Wordle, a randomly selected five-letter word. After each guess, the color of the tiles will change to show how close your guess was to the word. If you have the right letter in the right spot, it shows up green. A correct letter in the wrong spot shows up yellow. A letter that isn’t in the word in any spot shows up gray. With each “burner” word, you can learn hints about the letter and their placements, and then, you get one chance to guess the Wordle.
This simple yet entertaining game became extremely viral within the first two months of 2022. According to the New York Times — the new owner of the game —over 300,000 people play it daily. New York Times bought Wordle from Josh Wardle, a software engineer who originally created the game for his partner. Wardle shared in an interview with BBC that the game will never become monetized. New York Times has since reassured that as well.
Now, Wordle may be simple, but the reason behind its success is so complex and compelling that many experts have shared their thoughts about it. According to an article on Insider, psychologist Lee Chambers said that the game “stimulate[s] both the language and logic processing centers of our brains.” The body releases dopamine during this process, resulting in players returning to Wordle each day.
Thi Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah and a scholar of games, wrote a Twitter thread offering his opinion on why the game went viral — an opinion that most experts share. “The cleverest bit about Wordle is its social media presence,” he wrote. The best thing about Wordle is the graphic design of the shareable Wordle chart. There’s a huge amount of information — and drama — packed into that little graph. The statistics Wordle gives players are the number of total games played, their win percentage, how many words they’ve guessed in the game so far and how many times they’ve won in a row.
When you share your score on social media, the word and letters you chose are not visible. All that’s shown is your journey toward the word in a series of the same yellow, green and gray boxes. In this way, the puzzle isn’t spoiled. By sharing their results, players can see how well they stacked up to others for the day’s word. Seeing how well the community at large performed creates a friendly rivalry, pushing fans to strive for a better score on the next attempt.
The COVID-19 pandemic also helped in the exponential growth of the game since many users are stuck at home and lacking in social interactions. “The game feels really human and just enjoyable,” Wardle shared in an interview with Slate Magazine. “And that really resonates with where we’re at right now in the world and with COVID.”
Wordle is a brilliantly simple word-puzzle game, yes, but it’s also a conversation starter and a chance to step out of our daily routines, relax and lightheartedly compete and share with our online community.
Photo courtesy of Katelyn Kingcade