Speaking of: Wordle

Only a buzzkill like me could turn something totally innocuous like a daily puzzle game into a prediction about the downfall of society, yet here I go.

Though I had never actually tried a Wordle puzzle until today, I've been watching the game's ascent in fascination for a handful of weeks now, bemused at why all of a sudden now this type of puzzle game is seeing astronomical player growth. The concept is hardly new. It's virtually identical to Lingo, a gameshow on GSN through much of the 2000s that I loved while growing up (even if the puzzles were way too hard for a six-year-old). There were also online Lingo knockoff games like my treasured "Solingo" that have gameplays startlingly similar to Wordle. And even these get far predated by Mastermind, which admittedly used colors and not words but still operated off largely the same concepts.

I don't mean all of this in a hipster "I knew this before it was cool" way. It's just very obvious that this game has existed for years, and somehow it took until now for it to hit an escape velocity of users and become a staple in everyone's morning, and that's fascinating.

I think I can point to three reasons why that happened.

First, Wordle has a really elegant design, and the gameplay is super visually clean and intuitive. You didn't have to tell me a word about the founder for me to correctly guess he or she lives in the Bay Area and works for a nearby tech company as a software engineer. The Wordle interface has Silicon Valley minimalism written all over it, and it's definitely a more attractive execution of this game concept than any I've seen or used before.

Second, puzzle creator Josh Wardle was really clever in adding easy social-sharing features into the website. The easier it is to share something onto social media, the more likely it is that something will quickly proliferate across the internet, and therefore the more likely it is that something will truly become part of a cultural moment. None of the previous versions of this particular puzzle game utilized social media in this way, and I'm not trying to overlook how critical that was to the rise of Wordle.

But the third reason is the one that either terrifies me or fills me with immense hope, and that's that Josh Wardle was able to reverse engineer addiction with surgical precision relatively easily. He created something that 1) makes people feel smart, which is always a candidate for virality (think about all those "Share this post if you can name all the US states that have five letters in their name" posts that your aunt always shares), and 2) leaves everyone's gaming itch unquenched by only offering one try at one puzzle per day. Most iterations of this game have massive libraries of puzzles that can be accessed on-demand with new puzzles regenerating as soon as the previous one is solved. That is not the case here, and that failure to exhaust is exactly what keeps the game feeling fresh and utterly addicting.

But shouldn't it be somewhat concerning that the formula for addiction is this straight-forward? That we've learned how to deconstruct addiction so precisely that more screen time habits can be so easily engineered to have these same obsession-inducing qualities? This phenomenon isn't new with Wordle but very clearly revealed by Wordle. Because if I'm being honest, I really don't think either of the first two reasons I listed for World's success are having a massive material impact on its user growth. I think the high-majority of this user growth is because of this third reason regarding its extremely unfulfilling gameplay. Wordle is just "Lingo, but addictive." And Candy Crush is just "a tile-matching game, but addictive." And TikTok is just "Vine, but addictive." You get my point: we're getting scary good at taking old ideas and reworking them in just the right ways so that they hook you.

But you'll remember a few paragraphs ago I said this idea either terrifies me or fills me with immense hope, and I haven't decided which yet. That's because being able to create addictive, inherently viral content like this has two outcomes: an outpouring of content that connects a lot of people and brings us closer together (ex. Wordle), or an outpouring of content that traps a lot of people and pulls us farther apart (ex. extremely targeted viral conspiracy theories). I don't know which will get the upper hand, but it seems like both are inevitable to some degree.

Until we find out, I'm just going to enjoy a free puzzle game and not overthink it.