Have You Played Your Wordle Yet Today?
Have you done your Wordle yet today?
Man, yesterday’s was tough! It took me four tries, but I finally got there.
If you aren’t familiar with Wordle, it is the online word game that has taken the internet by storm. I am not on social media that much, so my husband Andrew introduced it to me. We are pretty competitive, so we are always looking for new games to play.
Keep in mind that I am not a trend-seeker or band-wagon person. I never got into Pokemon, Animal Crossing, or any of those other types of online phenomenons that captured the cultural zeitgeist of the time. I do things because I enjoy them. Not because everyone says I should.
And I do enjoy Wordle. It makes sense because I’ve always loved word games, whether Hangman when I was a kid or the New York Times Crossword puzzle when I got older. The creator of Wordle, Josh Wardle, says that Wordle is popular among linguists and Spelling Bee champs. While I have to admit that computer spellcheckers have severely weakened my ability to spell words correctly, I still have a love of language and a desire to broaden (and test) my vocabulary.
On a side note, much to Andrew’s dislike, I love the game show Wheel of Fortune. Growing up, Pat and Vanna were staples in my home and the homes of my relatives. Some nights we change the channel after Jeopardy to give him a break from Wheel, but I always tell him to get ready because it will be a regular part of our nightly programming in our golden years. I think because I have more time of Wheel watching under my belt, I am slightly a better Wordle solver than he is. I will concede I think he knows more unique words because he has a wider breadth of knowledge on many different topics, but I often “see” a word first when it comes to arranging letters.
Last weekend, playing Wordle inspired me to pull out the Scrabble board so we could play. Andrew won because he took advantage of a triple letter Q word, which also got doubled in a double word score. That alone was over 60 points in his column. But I did my best to hold my own.
I found a great interview online that Wardle gave to Slate.com. He shares how he originated the game and beta-tested it among friends and family back in 2013. He said they all agreed it had potential, but it needed some improvements. Fast forward to today, where Wardle said he resurrected it for his partner.
Wardle says, “She and I got really into the New York Times crossword, and she plays a lot of Spelling Bee as well.”
Wordle went viral in December. Soon players started sharing their Wordle scores and playing strategies on Twitter. Even Jimmy Fallon has featured it on his show.
Asked about what he thinks has made Wordle so popular, Wardle said he believes it is a combination of things. He thinks there are aspects of the game that are very human and connecting. He intentionally designed some features into the game that are antithetical to how companies today use social media apps to harvest data from end-users.
Wardle states, “I used to work in Silicon Valley, and I’m aware of the things that, especially with games, you’re meant to do with people’s attention. You’re trying to capture as much of people’s attention as you can. So that involves things like endless play, or sending them push notifications, or asking them for sign-up information. And philosophically, I enjoy doing the opposite of all those things, doing all the things that you are not meant to do, which I think has bizarrely had this effect where the game feels really human and just enjoyable. And that really resonates with where we’re at right now in the world and with COVID, and then also we’re trying to figure out, what is tech? What has tech become? I think that really resonates with people, and no ads—well, no monetization. People ask me a lot about these things, and it was like, I was literally just making a game for my partner, and I made some decisions that we would like.”
I love the rawness and the realness of that answer. I think that is what people are craving today. Or at least I am craving. I am so tired of everything being a hook to something else— sign up for this, subscribe for that, accept cookies here, forced to watch ads there.... arggggg! At some point, you just want to say enough is enough and turn everything off.
Now with that said, I am not naive enough to think that at least some data isn’t being collected about my gameplay on Wordle. It just isn’t how the internet works. Or, put another way, when something is free, as Wordle is, then YOU are the commodity. Wardle insists, however, that the only data he collects on the back end is when a person solves a word in three guesses or less. And that is all he knows. It is an aggregate collection of information without connecting directly to your play. That is how I understand his explanation anyway.
“What I’m collecting is, when you finish it in three, I know that someone somewhere finished it in three. I don’t know anything else about you. But I haven’t done anything with that data, because I’ve been far too busy. I have a full-time job and stuff. But the idea was maybe after each day I could share how the previous day had gone for everyone, and you could put yourself against people globally. But I’m wary about that stuff, because it makes it more competitive, or makes it more competitive with other people versus competitive with yourself. I’m fine with people competing with their friends and family, but if there was a global leaderboard, I don’t know. I’d worry about people’s motivations there. So maybe I’ll do something in the future, but no immediate plans.”
Again, how refreshing! Someone in the tech space who is actually thinking about the intention of their product, not only in its launch but in the fullness of its capabilities. Perhaps I shouldn’t sanctify a person I have never even met, but I think this kind of ethical integrity in tech should be applauded— and practiced— a lot more than it is.
This leads me to the last aspect I wanted to mention about Wordle. As addressed in the Slate interview, it is about how Wordle connects people. For as jaded and cynical as I can be about tech and online life, I know it has as much— maybe even more— power for good, as it does for bad. Andrew and I are already very connected but Wordle, at least for now, has given us one more thing to experience together. Likewise, Andrew asked his mom if she had played it. She said yes, she had tried it. It sparks conversation.
As Wardle put it: “So, although it gets seen a lot on Twitter, most people, I think, aren’t sharing their results on Twitter. They’re sharing them with friends and family in group chats and things like that. I get a ton of emails, and I got one yesterday from someone saying they have a teenage son, and they’re finding it hard to connect with him, but Wordle is something the father and the son do together each day. And I was just like, ‘Oh, my word, that’s amazing.’ Having it be able to be shared in with friends and family is just a really low effort way of checking in and letting people know you care about them. And there’s something new to discuss each day if you want to.”
At a time when we definitely need more things to be bringing us together, whether physically or virtually, if a simple wordplay game can meet that task, well then, in five letters, I say, _ _ _ _ _.
