The world of Wordle
Protocol
February 6, 2022
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It's all fun and games
A few weeks ago, Vivyan Tran, Protocol’s head of Digital, started a #wordle channel in our Slack without telling anyone. The only rule: “spoilers in thread pls.” Our whole team instantly understood the assignment, and ever since the channel has been an endless stream of black, yellow and green squares. People who get the answer in one or two tries get praise; the X/6 losers get sympathy.
The story of Wordle, at least the delightfully fun part, probably ended this week. What was once a game a developer made for his partner and buried on a hilariously unassuming URL will soon be a New York Times game, in there along with Spelling Bee (also super fun!) and the crossword (fun until Thursday, infuriating after that).
But the Wordle Effect will outlive Wordle. For one thing, Wordle is now a genre of games: you can play Wordle But Just With Dirty Words, Lord of The Rings Wordle, Taylor Swift Wordle, Pokémon Wordle and countless other spinoffs and knockoffs. You can even download the next 2,000 days of Wordle just by grabbing the existing site’s data, and play it yourself.
The game’s more important legacy, though, will be the things that made it work. (The Atlantic has a really good dive into the game’s mechanics, too.) Wordle was just a website: It required no log in or subscription, no onboarding flow, no nothing. It was a finite, universal experience: Once a day, everyone played the same game. And it really exploded when it became inherently social: Sharing and comparing your Wordle score is half the fun.
These aren’t just lessons for game developers, by the way. Lots of app-makers have discovered how useful it can be to let new users actually use the app, even with dummy data, before they sign up. And the internet as a whole is becoming more multiplayer, as people physically far apart look for ways to connect.
But there is definitely going to be a whole genre of games that take the Wordle magic and apply it to other kinds of games. One I’ve been enjoying this week is The Wikipedia Game, a dead-simple app created by Matt Morrison, who is by day the co-founder and CTO at Morta. The game is simple, and one I bet you’ve played before: You start on a random Wikipedia page and try to get to a specific other page in as few clicks as possible. I used to call it “Six Degrees of Wikipedia,” but most people know it as The Wikipedia Game.
“What I thought Wordle was amazing at was being non-addictive, and the mechanism for sharing,” Morrison told me this week over Zoom. He’s a Wordle fan, you might say, without being a total obsessive. “But I loved the concept. And then I thought, OK, what games did I used to play that I found really fun?” He landed on The Wikipedia Game as the perfect mix of social, competitive and inherently internetty. He built it with a similar sharing mechanism, which tracks both how long it takes you to solve the puzzle and how many steps it took. There’s a new puzzle every day, which Morrison and his wife cook up every morning. (“Which is quite fun itself,” he said.)
So far, Morrison said, around 1,500 people have tried their hand at The Wikipedia Game. He’s already getting player feedback: Some people are cranky about Wikipedia’s “did you mean” pages counting as an extra click, and the back button doesn’t always work as intended. And, just like Wordle, if you really want to cheat, it’s not very hard. There’s even a website for it. But “you’re only cheating yourself,” Morrison said. “You can also just copy and paste the [Wordle] squares however you want, right? That’s not fun.”
Morrison told me he doesn’t have any dreams of a Wordle-style seven-figure exit. (Though, to be fair, neither did Josh Wardle.) He just wants to make your group chats a little more fun. “If it can bring people together for three minutes a day, that’s actually probably enough.” That, right there, might be the true enduring legacy of Wordle: finding ways to bring people together, even for a few minutes a day, is a bigger deal than you might think.
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