Smart daily brain tease works magic, makes eager crowd happy, later turns truly viral – until game’s adept maker earns great money (ample Times bucks). Yes, it is sometimes hard not to think entirely in five-letter words after an encounter with Wordle, the online game that requires participants to guess a five-letter word in six tries. It was quietly launched last October by Josh Wardle, a Welsh, Brooklyn-based software engineer who created it for the amusement of his partner.
In November, its users numbered a few hundred. Now, they are in the millions. Mr Wardle has sold the game to the New York Times for a seven-figure sum – having previously said that he felt somewhat overwhelmed by the responsibility to the game’s fans to keep the site running perfectly.
Wordle’s (and Wardle’s) success is entirely deserved, even though it is sad to see the plucky, independent puzzle sucked up into the insatiable maw of big business. The game seems the apogee of simplicity, but in fact that is deceptive; it is pitched to utter perfection. Its ultimate ancestor is probably Scrabble, and it has that look about it, with its colour-coded virtual tiles. There is nothing off-puttingly high-concept about the game – it appeals across the generations and it is easy to grasp how it works. It takes but a few moments to complete it, too; rare are the days that players find themselves entirely outfoxed. But it has just enough difficulty to feel teasing and testing. Finishing the game brings with it a burst of satisfaction – whether that’s a feeling of delight at solving the puzzle in two (fluke?) or three (fortunate?) goes, or the sensation of relief at managing to crack it at the last possible opportunity.
Players build up their own ways of playing, some beginning each new game with the same, intensely considered “starter word”, others throwing caution to the winds with a random guess. (Sharing one’s regular starter word, it turns out, is an oddly intimate thing to do.) At a time when many people long for reassurance, the game provides precisely that. Like the readers of a well-plotted detective story, its players are made to feel smart.
There’s a great appeal, too, in the way that Wordle breaks the supposed rules of what works online. Instead of bugging its users with prompts and alerts, players must remember to seek it out. Refreshingly it offers only one game a day – you cannot fritter hours away on Wordle (except by playing in other languages – many versions have sprung up, from Spanish and German to Welsh, Gaelic and even Latin). At the same time, it cleverly allows its users to share the day’s results, without specific spoilers, so that friends and family can compare the day’s game.
Only the harshest of critics would begrudge Mr Wardle his windfall. He has announced that the New York Times will keep the game free to access – and he is working with them, he says, to make the transition to the paper’s site as smooth as possible. The New York Times, for its part, must take its duty of care seriously. Even to consider hiding Wordle behind a paywall would be against the innocent spirit of this wholly delightful game.
