Wordle is now on the NYT website. What does the word game's success say about us?

Unlike most other successful mobile games, Wordle makes no attempt to ‘gamify’ your experience by offering to take you up to the next level or encouraging you to chase an elusive target.

It likely started with a few people on your social media timeline sharing cryptic squares of different colours and ended with you being hooked to the game.

Wordle has been famously called the first viral game of 2022. By all estimates, its success has been unprecedented, with the number of players growing from merely 90 in November 2021, to 300,000 in early January and about two million a week by the time the month ended.

Earlier this year, the New York Times (NYT) announced it had acquired Wordle - the game has now been added to the NYT website, with a new font.

Wordle’s growth is admirable, especially given that it isn’t an action game, nor does it have any flashy graphics. Unlike most other successful mobile games like Candy Crush, it makes no attempt to ‘gamify’ your experience by offering to take you up to the next level or encouraging you to chase an elusive target like endless runner games such as Temple Run. There’s no ‘next level’ in Wordle – you either win or you lose – and it certainly discourages mindlessness. And yet, somehow, this very simple game model has taken over the internet like few other games before it.

Also read: Will Wordle last as long as the Crossword?

Wordle hits the sweet spot between the high-brow NYT Crossword and a massy game like, say, Farmville. It challenges you but just enough to not put you off, presents just one problem to solve – unlike a crossword which has several words – and makes you wait just long enough so you return the next day and start over. You don’t have to be some 5 am-waking, Harvard-going, NYT Crossword-solving overachiever. As long as you don’t mind being pushed just a little outside of your comfort zone and have a passable knowledge of the English vocabulary, you can, by posting just a few coloured boxes on your Twitter feed, strike up a conversation even with a highly intelligent type.

And that’s the other thing that Wordle taps into. No matter how humble we may pretend to be, most of us are fuelled by the need to show off exactly how intelligent we are. Even those of us who avoid sharing our score daily on social media, are likely to share it on the day we encounter a particularly difficult word.

Also read: Wordle and free games like Wordle that we just can't stop playing

The sharing itself is a very analogue process. Wordle doesn’t link to any social media or messaging platform; it requires you to copy your results from the browser, fire up the platform where you’d like to share them and paste them there. At a time when sharing is often a one-click/tap process, this is an arduous routine to follow.

And yet the brightly coloured grids are ubiquitous. Your mom shares it on the family WhatsApp group, your boss posts it on her social media, and on days when you can’t seem to get any work done, you give into the temptation and have a go at it too.

No matter why we play Wordle or why we share our scores, each grid of grey, yellow, and green boxes, reveals our individual struggles. Some may have managed to complete the game in three attempts, others may have just about managed to scrape through on the sixth, still others may have failed today despite having gotten four out of five letters on the first attempt.

The coloured grids also reveal our diverse individual journeys but also remind us that no matter our struggles or what path we choose to take, we’re all heading towards the same destination. I suspect, it’s something we’ve come to realise more acutely than ever in these past two years. Wordle’s success is phenomenal, sure, but it’s certainly not surprising.