Culture

Money: The five-letter word that could kill the Wordle craze

New York Times says online word game will ‘initially’ remain free to use

Wordle, played by millions just four months after it burst on to the internet, was bought by the New York Times for ‘the low seven figures’. Photograph: Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty

Donald Clarke's face
Donald Clarke
Fri Feb 4 2022 - 05:00

Golden eras flit by more quickly in the digital epoch. The Pax Romana – Rome Classic, as today’s marketers might style it – lasted about 200 years. There is less dispute about the fall of that empire than there is about The Simpsons’ gilded period, but we can probably allow the animated show seven or eight classic seasons. Future cultural histories of the 2020s may, however, end up arguing that Wordle enjoyed just six weeks of unqualified ascendancy.

It began just before Christmas, when the online word game, first unveiled as recently as last October, installed a feature that allowed players to share their results on Twitter. The most negatively minded will argue those glory days ended last week when the New York Times bought Wordle for a reported seven-figure sum. Already? We still have red-faced blowhards boasting they’ve never heard of the thing. Wordle, we hardly knew ye.

There is no need to be quite so miserable. The New York Times has said the game will "initially" remain free to users. The paper does have a paywall, but some of its games and puzzles are available to non-subscribers. "It's a little early for us to talk about where we might go," Jonathan Knight, the paper's general manager of games, told the Guardian. "Our number one objective is to continue what makes this game so special – I think in that regard we are more like stewards at the beginning." One worries about that "initially" and that "at the beginning," but it sounds as if the Times has some grasp of how Wordle's magic works.

The story is remarkable. Josh Wardle, a software engineer originally from Wales and living in New York, dreamt up the game to entertain himself and his partner Palak Shah. Players have six chances to guess a five-letter word. On each attempt they are told which letters are in the right position and which are found at different places in the answer. There are precedents. There was a pen-and-paper game called Jotto and a British TV game show called Lingo. The "word" version of quiz show Mastermind, a board game popular in the 1970s, also used many of the same rules. But Wardle's tweaks and alterations proved ideal for the handheld generation.

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It is important to note what Wordle doesn't do. It does not ask you to create a username. It works in browsers, but it is not available as a standalone app (though several unlicenced clones have appeared in that form). Most importantly, it makes available just one clue a day, and that clue is the same for all users. There is something sweet about a product that allows consumers less of what they crave. If McDonald's limited punters to just one Big Mac a week there would be riots across the globe.

The word “community” is much overused, but the Wordle approach really did create something a little like a vast family, millions strong, of furrow-browed puzzlers. Late in December, Twitter feeds began to fill with geometric arrangements of coloured squares – like rudimentary, static Tetris patterns – as players posted records of their daily games. No letters were visible, but the user could get a vague gist of how strategies played out. Those who revealed the daily answer or even gave explicit clues to the word became overnight pariahs (“knoll”, in particular, triggered a wave of smart-aleck allusions to the JFK assassination). There was minor outrage on this side of the Atlantic when “favor” appeared spelt thus. Some speculated – almost certainly without justification – that the arrival of “shire”, a word more common in Britain than America, a few days later constituted an informal apology. Some players log on at midnight. Others play over morning coffee. The superhumanly disciplined are able to save their game for an afternoon chill.

All this happened in a little over a month. The blood-soaked, yell-friendly, 24-hour cockfight that was Twitter enjoyed a rare moment of collective warmth. Everybody wanted more. But most understood that it was the rationing of questions that kept Wordle special. The game requires logical thinking, but the reliance on luck is also part of the appeal. It seems like witchcraft when, as if inspired by invisible waves, you happen upon a correct result in just two guesses.

Can the great days really be over? Most such crazes eventually fade into background noise, but any attempt to put Wordle behind a paywall would greatly hasten that process. The New York Times remained tight-lipped about specifics. “Wordle has created a huge daily engagement phenomenon and we see intrinsic value in that,” Knight continued. There is every chance that some not-hugely-dissimilar version of the game will be available for years to come.

Yet something will still have been lost. No decent person begrudges Wardle his success. "I'd be lying if I said this hasn't been overwhelming. After all, I am just one person," he said after the New York Times sale. But the plucky independent pastime that, every midnight, edges aside competition from a million digital behemoths is no more. It's like when Elvis moved from Sun Records to RCA Victor. Life moves too fast.

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