And just like that, I became a Wordle player.
Granted, it has only been two weeks, so the bloom is still on the rose. Wordle and I are squarely in the honeymoon phase. But something tells me this new habit is going to last. Barring a brief adolescent infatuation with Pac-Man in the early 1980s, I’ve never been much of a gamer. Wordle, however, shows all signs of becoming an obsession, but a manageable one.
If you haven’t heard of Wordle, don’t feel bad; I hadn’t either until a few weeks ago. It’s an online word game developed by a software engineer named Josh Wardle — whose last name arguably made Wordle his destiny — in which players are given six chances to discover a randomly selected five-letter word. As you begin guessing, Wordle gives you information about correct letters and placement, so each of the five chances after your first guess moves you closer to the correct answer.
There are a few reasons why I’ve become crazy about Wordle. First of all, it’s a good mental exercise to jump start my brain every morning.
Second, it takes very little time. There’s only one Wordle each day, so even if you were tempted to, you couldn’t get lured into a Wordle time suck. Wordle protects you from your obsessive instincts by its very miserly nature. A Wordle takes just takes a few minutes to play — or even just a few seconds, depending on how bold, lucky, and strategic you are.
Third, it’s communal without being collaborative. Everyone gets the same Wordle every day, so you can celebrate and commiserate with your family and friends about Wordles that were particularly tricky. Should you attain the Holy Grail of Wordle — getting the answer correct on the first guess — you can gloat with impunity, although no one wants to hear the details (“Hearing a blow-by-blow account of someone else’s Wordle is almost as bad as listening to them describe a dream,” a friend’s daughter said. “Trust me, no one else cares about your Wordle.”).
But the main reason I like Wordle is that in a world rife with petty frustrations — peeling a fresh hard-boiled egg, pulling the correct thread to open up a feed bag, spreading cold butter on bread — Wordle gives me a daily shot at success, an opportunity to feel capable and clever. It’s the one thing I can seem to get right every day. So far, at least.
