[game 526]
Wordle
Puzzle
Web
Josh Wardle (2021)
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The daily web game that kind of started them all (by accident?).
So simple even your grandma can play it, Wordle became a phenomenon in 2021 when absolutely nothing was happening of any historical importance. I mean, it is not like we had just been introduced to the concept of a species-altering global pandemic and decided to just let it cook after hiding from it for a week or so. We weren't desperate for social interaction and a feeling of accomplishment after some dark, dark times or anything. Into this void stepped Wordle, a word guessing game undoubtedly inspired by a classic code breaking game sometimes called Mastermind. The two features that made it explode are the one-puzzle-per-day limit and the social sharing. Forced scarcity is always a draw for folks and the desperation for social connections made the cool-looking emoji-based sharing a hit with people recovering from correctly afraid that their neighbor had a highly contagious, often deadly illness.
Actually, though, it is kind of boring. The New York Times bought it and now it feels like the DIY fun has been drained out of it as well, for some reason, probably because NYT packaged it with a bunch of other games to cash in on their investment. They're also aggressively defending their fancy copyright because capitalism, so... boo. The social sharing has calmed down as far as I can tell in my own social media bubble and that makes sense because we get our social interaction elsewhere these days, I suppose. There are only, like, 2000 words anyways so you've got until 2026 or 2027 to get them all before the game is over, I guess?
So, if you are chatting with your grandma and she's stoked to have you both share Wordle results, by all means play this. Otherwise, I think you'll be alright if you don't.
So simple even your grandma can play it, Wordle became a phenomenon in 2021 when absolutely nothing was happening of any historical importance. I mean, it is not like we had just been introduced to the concept of a species-altering global pandemic and decided to just let it cook after hiding from it for a week or so. We weren't desperate for social interaction and a feeling of accomplishment after some dark, dark times or anything. Into this void stepped Wordle, a word guessing game undoubtedly inspired by a classic code breaking game sometimes called Mastermind. The two features that made it explode are the one-puzzle-per-day limit and the social sharing. Forced scarcity is always a draw for folks and the desperation for social connections made the cool-looking emoji-based sharing a hit with people recovering from correctly afraid that their neighbor had a highly contagious, often deadly illness.
Actually, though, it is kind of boring. The New York Times bought it and now it feels like the DIY fun has been drained out of it as well, for some reason, probably because NYT packaged it with a bunch of other games to cash in on their investment. They're also aggressively defending their fancy copyright because capitalism, so... boo. The social sharing has calmed down as far as I can tell in my own social media bubble and that makes sense because we get our social interaction elsewhere these days, I suppose. There are only, like, 2000 words anyways so you've got until 2026 or 2027 to get them all before the game is over, I guess?
So, if you are chatting with your grandma and she's stoked to have you both share Wordle results, by all means play this. Otherwise, I think you'll be alright if you don't.