Why ‘Wordle’, the word guessing game that has got hooked on the internet, is so addictive

‘Wordle‘is the new pretty girl of simple, direct and fast internet games. If any of your internet contacts have recently shared an enigmatic message with some colored boxes and a cryptic numerical code, it is the result of his daily game to ‘Wordle’. Like other similar phenomena in online games, such as that ‘Flappy Bird’ that unhinged millions of people a few years ago, ‘Wordle’ finds in its simplicity of use and the schematic nature of its concept the best weapons to have become a success.

Its rules are not new or original (they are inspired both by the mythical ‘Mastermind’ and by traditional crosswords), but their implementation is, outlined with unusual precision. Here’s how to play:

• You have to guess a five letter english language word (of the 12,000 that exist, 2,500 more accessible have been selected) in just six attempts
• After entering the word and pressing Enter, the letters of the proposed word are colored. In green if you have got the letter and place right, in yellow if you have got the letter right but it is in another place and without coloring if the letter is not in the word.
• What’s more, the keyboard that accompanies the web lights up with the letters that you have already used to help you. Of course, there are no clues that indicate if any letter is repeated.

And that’s it. That simple and that infectious.

From hobby to phenomenon

The game was born as a gift from software engineer Josh Wardle to his partner, as a private game to entertain themselves during the pandemic. The title is a small nod to his last name. They played first, then the family in a WhatsApp group, where they saw how addictive it could be. In October 2021, he launched the ‘Wordle’ website. Two months later, there were 300,000 people playing every day.

Wardle is no stranger to viral freaks: in his day he designed two actions for Reddit that became absolute freaks: ‘Place‘ Y ‘The Button‘. In this case, the experiment is even simpler, but … what makes ‘Wordle’ a success? One of the keys, without a doubt, is that it does not allow us to play as much as we want.

‘Wordle’ is relentless with its one word per day per player restriction. That makes the short games of the game, around three minutes, can become an accessible routine for anyone, a little parenthesis in the daily obligations to try to guess a word. It’s something Wardle copied from proposals like ‘Spelling Bee‘, another linguistic puzzle that only poses a daily challenge in the’ New York Times’.

The simplicity of the web design, which clearly does not want to sell products or collect data, but simply to propose a few minutes of honest entertainment, facilitates accessibility. Everything in the design of the ‘Wordle’ website is aimed at facilitating the experience, which includes the nice possibility to share the results through social networks, also exposed in a particularly cryptic way, displaying our last game but without the letters, and with the number of attempts without further adornment.

Unlike what is usual in these cases, where you would have to log in to share the results, ‘Wordle’ creates an image that can be easily copied and pasted without giving up data. There are no restrictions on online competition and, by not allowing more than one game per day, the competition is geared more to “this is what I have achieved” than to “I have done better than you because I have invested more hours in it”. A real balm in these times.

Header photo | George dolgikh