Wordle
Wordle is a web-based word game created and developed by Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle. Players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with feedback given for each guess in the form of colored tiles indicating when letters match or occupy the correct position. The mechanics are similar to the 1955 pen-and-paper game Jotto and the television game show franchise Lingo. Wordle has a single daily solution, with all players attempting to guess the same word.
Wordle
Josh Wardle (2021–2022)
The New York Times Games (since 2022)
October 2021
Wardle created the game to play with his partner, eventually making it public in October 2021. The game gained popularity in December 2021 after Wardle added the ability for players to copy their daily results as emoji squares, which were widely shared on Twitter. Many clones and variations of the game were also created, as were versions in languages besides English. Wordle was purchased by The New York Times Company in January 2022 for an undisclosed seven-figure sum and moved to the newspaper's Games section in February.
History[edit]
Early development[edit]
Wardle created the prototype of Wordle in 2013, inspired by the color-matching game Mastermind.[26][27] The prototype allowed players to play puzzles consecutively, and its wordlist was unfiltered.[17] At first the game used all 13,000 possible five letter words in the English language, but he found that his partner Palak Shah had difficulty recognizing some of the less common words and made the guessing as haphazard as it was in Mastermind. He then used Shah as a simple filter to trim down the word list to around 2,000 words that were more recognizable – roughly five years of puzzles on a daily basis.[26] After finishing the prototype around 2014, Wardle lost interest and set the prototype aside.[26]
In the meantime, Wardle created the two online social experiments The Button and Place while working for Reddit.[13][26] When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, he and his partner "got really into" The New York Times' Spelling Bee and daily crossword puzzle.[13][17] Wardle recalled his Wordle prototype and was inspired by two elements from Spelling Bee to flesh out the prototype further: the simple-to-use website design for the puzzle, and the limitation of one puzzle per day. By January 2021, Wardle had published Wordle on the web, mostly shared with himself and his partner. He had named it Wordle as a pun on his surname.[13]
Rise in popularity[edit]
Later he shared it with his relatives, where it "rapidly became an obsession" for them.[13][26] Over the next few months, he continued to share the Wordle website with other close friends, leading to the viral spread of attention to the puzzle by mid-October 2021.[26] In one case, he found that it had become popular with a group of friends in New Zealand, where they had created the emoji-style display of the guesses which they shared with friends, which inspired Wardle to incorporate the feature into the game.[28][17] After he had added this feature, the game became a viral phenomenon on Twitter in late December 2021.[29][2][30] A Gale-published article even claims that "Wordle is less about winning and more about the friends we make along the way" due to the new ease of sharing.[31]
Over 300,000 people played Wordle on January 2, 2022, up from 90 players on November 1, 2021,[13] a figure that rose to over 2 million a week later.[32] Between January 1 and 13, 1.2 million Wordle results were shared on Twitter.[28] Several media outlets, including CNET and The Indian Express, attributed the game's popularity to the dailiness of the puzzles.[33][2] Wardle suggested that having one puzzle per day creates a sense of scarcity, leaving players wanting more; he also noted that it encourages players to spend only three minutes on the game each day.[13] He also noted some subtler details about the game, such as the game's keyboard changing to reflect the game state, as reasons for players' enjoyment.[17] He had said that he has no intention to monetize the game and "It's not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs ... It's just a game that's fun."[34][27] In an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today, Wardle stated that he does not know each day's word so he can still enjoy playing the game himself.[35]
Separately, an entirely different game called Wordle! by Steven Cravotta, which had been released on the App Store five years prior to Wardle's Wordle, saw a boost in downloads and purchases from people who thought it was Wardle's game; according to Cravotta, between January 5 and 12, 2022, his game was downloaded over 200,000 times.[36][37] Cravotta was glad to see his game's resurgence, though recognized purchasers were likely buying it thinking it was Wardle's Wordle. In collaboration with Wardle, he donated $50,000 from revenues to Boost in Oakland, California, a charity providing tutoring to Oakland schoolchildren.[38][39]
Google Search created an Easter egg when one searches for "Wordle", with the site's logo becoming an animated game of Wordle to find the word "Google".[40] To prevent play from being spoiled, Twitter took action to block an auto-reply bot that replied to any Wordle result post with the next day's word.[41]
Acquisition by the New York Times Company[edit]
On January 31, 2022, the New York Times Company, the parent company of The New York Times, acquired Wordle from Wardle for an "undisclosed price in the low-seven figures."[42] According to Wardle, the sudden attention he and his partner had gotten over the previous few months had made them uncomfortable, and also he did not feel like spending the effort to fight against clones of Wordle that were appearing. Wardle said that "It felt really complicated to me, really unpleasant", and that being able to sell the rights to Wordle made it easy "to walk away from all of that."[26] Jonathan Knight of the Times games department contacted Wardle on January 5, 2022, two days after Wordle was featured in a Times article. With the acquisition by January 31, chief product officer Alex Hardiman said "I don’t think I’ve ever seen us move on an acquisition this fast."[43] Vanity Fair reported that the Times had just edged out The Washington Post in acquiring the game.[43]
The Times intended to add the game to its mobile app alongside its crossword puzzles and Spelling Bee, seeking to bring in digital subscribers up to 10 million by 2025. The Times stated the game would initially remain free to new and existing users and that no changes would be made to its gameplay.[42][44][45] Fans expressed worries that the acquisition meant the game would eventually be put behind a paywall.[46] As the game operates entirely using client-side Javascript code run in the browser, some players have downloaded the webpage for offline use due to fears that the New York Times Company would modify the game undesirably.[47][48]
On February 10, the game was officially moved to The New York Times's website, with statistics carrying over; however, some players reported that their daily streaks reset after the switch.[49] The Times producers did not want to change any significant parts of Wordle except for two facets, moving the game to work in React so that it could be integrated with the Times online games app, and adding support for users to log in with their Times account as another way to track progress.[50]
As part of the move, the Times eliminated some possible word guesses that they felt were insensitive or offensive terms such as "slave" and "lynch" so as to "keep the puzzle accessible to more people", and also eliminated some British spelling variants such as "fibre".[51] The Times had also changed planned words in response to current events as to keep Wordle separate from the news. In May 2022, the solution word "fetus" was removed following the leaked draft decision in abortion-related United States Supreme Court case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, to keep the game separate from the news.[52] As of July 2022, a total of seven words have been removed from the original 2,315 Wordle answers. Because of these deletions, the Times version of Wordle is now out of synchronization with cached or saved versions of Wordle, making it difficult for players of the two versions to compare their solution scores.[51] By August 24, 2022, the New York Times Crossword app was updated to include Wordle, with player progression still synced between mobile and desktop versions.[53]
On April 7, WordleBot was launched by the New York Times to give players information about how they completed their Wordle on that day, giving a luck and skill rating.[16] Some users felt that the WordleBot responses became patronizing and insulting as the analysis of a player's completed puzzle progressed.[54]
According to the Times quarterly earnings report ending on March 31, 2022, the acquisition of Wordle brought "tens of millions" of new players to the Times puzzle site and app, many of whom continued to play the other puzzles offered by the Times.[55] Editors in the Times games department called the following months the "Hot Wordle Summer" due to further increases in players on their games app resulting from Wordle.[43]
