What in the Wordle is this?

A daily word game has taken the Internet by storm. Frequent players tell mid-day why the world is obsessing over it

Imagine having your loved one build a game just for you. The new Internet sensation, Wordle, is exactly that. Brooklyn-based software engineer John Wardle came up with the concept for his partner Palak Shah who loved solving word games. Wordle, which is a play on his last name, was initially built just for the two of them. It was only after seeing the obsession among his friends and family that he thought of it as something bigger and released it to the rest of the world in October. According to the article in New York Times, 90 people played the game on November 1 and by the start of January, there were more than 3,00,000 players.

Nirav Mehta is a marketing consultant who also runs a book club, Broke Bibliophiles in Mumbai. As a board game enthusiast and avid reader, Mehta says he felt compelled to try Wordle after it went viral. “I found out about the game earlier this month because of the NYT article and wanted to give it a shot,” he says. In the web-based word game, every 24 hours there’s a new word of the day. The five-letter word needs to be guessed in six attempts without clues. If you have the right letter in the right spot, it shows up green. A correct letter in the wrong spot is indicated by yellow. You only get one shot at the Wordle. If you mess up, you have to wait until the next day to get a brand new puzzle. 

Pritpal Sudan gets on his Discord channel with friends every night at 11.30, where they compete to see who guesses the word in fewer attempts

What intrigued Khushi Shah, programme manager at BYJU’S, was the lack of structure in the game. “It doesn’t have rules like other word games such as Scrabble.” That said, it’s not a mindless game and it doesn’t take up a lot of your time, thinks Pritpal Sudan, a 20-year-old musician in Mumbai. It’s the time factor that prompted Kanupriya Joshi, an executive at a travel technology company, to keep coming back to it every day.

While Mehta manages to solve the game within five minutes every night, Sudan takes anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes. Shah, however, prefers to take it at her own pace. “I usually start in the morning before work, then during my lunch and finally get done with it in the evening.” Of all, Joshi manages to crack it the quickest in under two minutes, within four to five attempts.

Khushi Shah, Nirav Mehta Pic/Hitakshi Mehta, Rishi Alwani and Kanupriya Joshi

According to Rishi Alwani, industry analyst and communications manager at SuperGaming, Wordle has the world going bonkers because it has a hidden habit-forming element. “Players can’t solve all the puzzles in one time, so they return to it the next day.” The second reason, he adds, is because the game offers players the chance to share their word grid without spoilers. Once you’ve successfully or unsuccessfully done the puzzle for the day, you’re invited to share your Wordle journey with other players. Sudan, who got introduced to Wordle via a friend on Twitter and has been playing for roughly 10 days now, says it ultimately boils down to who gets the bragging rights.

In a recent Twitter thread, C Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, discussed how the cleverest part about Wordle is its social media presence. He describes the Wordle graph as, “a particular little arc of decisions, attempts, and failures.” But each little posted box is a neat synopsis of somebody else’s arc of action, failure, choice, and success, he adds. “You can just glance and see how they did, get the shape of how they tried, and see when they, say, got stuck for a while and suddenly made a bit of progress and saw it. That’s the really special thing about Wordle, I think.” However, this feature was only integrated into the app around December. “Game developers think of virality as a feature and try to build in because people have short attention spans,” says Alwani.

When it comes to gameplay, people have developed their own tricks and techniques. While some always use the word ‘Adieu’ in their first attempt because it eliminates the vowels, others like Mehta attempt to eliminate the consonants. “I start with the word ‘Great’ because it has vowels and other consonants too. So, first two attempts go in cracking that part to know which vowels and consonants can be eliminated,” says Shah.

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