Having played it for the past few weeks, my conclusion is that it’s a kind of Internet feel-good game, by which I mean it’s designed to have a VERY high rate of success. I mean, think about it: you’ve got 30 blank boxes and only 26 possible letters to choose among, some of which you will be told (in the “hard” version, anyway) are correct choices and if they’re in the right places.
I think it would be very tough to come up with a 5-letter word that COULDN’T be guessed on your 6th try, given all the letters you’d be able to eliminate in your first 5 turns.
So the idea, brilliant in its way, is to come up with a concept that seems challenging but is merely time-consuming. As an experiment, imagine that you got a few more turns–say if WORDLE were eight turns or ten turns. Everyone with two brain cells to rub together could guess the word given that many tries. Now turn the experiment around, and let’s say the game ends after three turns. That makes it basically a game of luck, and no one would play it. Six tries is JUST the right number for nearly everyone to get the word and still feel that their skill was the reason they “won.”
It reminds me of the stupid Facebook games (minus the data-mining) that bets you you can’t name a city or a fish or a type of sandwich without the letter O. Of course everyone rises to the challenge “What? That’s so easy! I must be one of the smart people!”
Wordle is the same, just more subtle, a game that everyone can win, almost every single time out of the box. When you “lose” wordle, all that means is either that you couldn’t follow very simple rules (repeating letters that have already gotten the hook, etc.) or you just had bad luck. It’s a kind of harmless little scam.
I think another part of its appeal, in this age of social media, is the availability and attractiveness of instantly sharing a result. You see someone else share, with one click and paste you can share too!
It fills the same role as things like crossword puzzles and the jumble in the newspaper. Do people really want to be challenged and defeated by a word guessing game? Or do they want to be briefly entertained and given the opportunity to share their results with their friends?
I dunno, it is actually a brain-puzzler for me. I haven’t lost yet, but if I’m not cheating by looking at word lists, I’m stretching my mental powers to think of words that fit the hints. Sometimes I work on a puzzle off and on for an hour or two.
They are very hard sometimes, but I know in the end I will get the answer, and I enjoy doing this little exercise every day.
Also, I always use a different word to begin, so it’s a bit of fun for me to pick out what the next one will be.
It only takes a few minutes, you’ll usually win, and you can’t play more than once/day. If I could sit there playing Wordle after Wordle, I would quickly lose my patience. I know there are apps that let you do this, and I’m not downloading them.
As @Mr.E says, it’s like the daily crossword puzzle – you sit down daily for a non-impossible challenge and get a little victory.
Picking the right words, you can definitely figure out the letters – at least when there are no repeats. But what if you figure out that the letters are: A E L S T ?
Is the word stale? steal? least? slate? teals? Sure you can rule some letters have to be or can’t be in various places, but if you ‘spent’ a ton of the ‘slots’ in your first five words eliminating wrong letters, and only happened to use the correct letters one time each?
have you played the game yet? If you left AELST over until the end, you’d have a lot of choices, true. But the way it works, you’d find that one of those had been used earlier, and you’d probably know where at least one or two of them went in the correct word.
If I ever do lose, I think I’ll experiment as long as my streak is snapped and I’ll try to lose a game and report back. I’m trying to think of a 5-letter word with extremely unlikely letters now QUELL stupidly uses a double-letter, but it also uses an E which is a highly likely letter.
I’m going to object to the comparison to crosswords. These - at least the ones I do - are not meant to give you a cheap I dunnit high. And yes, I do want to be challenged. I get just as disappointed in a crossword that is too easy as I do with one that is too difficult.
Oh, thank goodness I’m not the only one. It’s challenging for me, too, and all I do all day is write. I’ve even missed it once, and had a couple of 6s. And I don’t consider myself a dumb person.
I agree with this. As long as you make your first few guesses reasonably (use more common letters first and don’t repeat a bunch of letters) you’re very likely to solve a Wordle puzzle. In ~40 plays between myself and 2 friends who share our scores each day, none of us has failed a puzzle and there have been only 2 times that it took until the 6th guess.
It can be hard to cover all 26 letters even in 30 letter-guesses because you have to guess actual words, and you have to balance covering more letters with early guesses and not waiting to figure out what the vowels are until guess 4, so when the word contains less-common letters, you’re often not going to know them until pretty late. Like, a few days ago when the word was PROXY, it’s not too hard to use 4 guesses to figure out just R,O, and maybe not either position. That can be a challenge to figure out!
It appears that the solution space is much smaller than the set of 5 letter words, so the difficulty could be increased by using more obscure words with less common letters. Like, how many people would get XYLEM if it were the solution? Fewer than average for sure.
This is why I go for the diagramless puzzles, starting with the easy ones and then moving up the difficulty scale.
What gets me peeved for any type of crossword puzzle is when the clue is given in the wrong form for the answer, for example, the clue is given in present tense but the answer is past tense.
When I lose Wordle it’s either because I just can’t come up with a word that fits with the letters remaining (I’m not great at Scrabble either) or I get stuck with some very common correct letters with a lot of possible words.
You’re right in general though. It’s popular because most people can get it most of the time. There’s only one a day so you don’t get sick of it, you look forward to doing it instead of getting saturated by a day of binging multiple games.
Edit: The fact they are all capital letters puts me off a bit.