Is Wordle the purest pastime in the English-speaking world? It is. Let me count the ways. One, this 5 by 6 grid of thirty squares is free. Two, you don't need an app to play it, Safari or Chrome will do. In a cluttered online world, where the sinuous reach of browsers is increasingly siloed into single-destination apps, it's great to have a madly popular puzzle-game that's just a bookmark. I like the illusion this creates of travelling to play; in these cloistered Covid times, Wordle is my daily outing.
Its goofy but lovely that the inventor of Wordle is a man called Wardle. Better still, he invented the game to entertain his wife who, by virtue of being named Palak Shah, allows desis to believe that Wordle was made for us. Best of all, at a time when every niche in the digital universe is designed to suck customers in and intensify 'engagement', you can't play Wordle more than once a day. A game you can't obsess over, that doesn't make its maker any money by design, an interface that has no hooks to tempt you down some digital rabbit hole, suggests a state of disinterested innocence that is almost unreal.
And yet, it is a peculiarly digital state of innocence. Newspaper crosswords have the same one-per-day characteristic as Wordle does - with three crucial differences. One, crosswords are harder to share with a community of friends as is almost everything else in the analog world. Two, crosswords are just harder, period, even the non-cryptic ones. It's very unlikely that most people need more than six attempts to guess the word so their hot streak will likely last forever. Three, unlike the deferred satisfaction of comparing your penciled-in crossword with the solved version in the next day's paper, Wordle offers instant gratification. When you get it right and the word goes green and the individual letters do that little equalizer jig, a pulse of perfect contentment sets you up for the rest of the day.
More than any game I've ever played, Wordle is a community sport. It's what makes it worthwhile and gives it just enough of a competitive edge to keep you interested. People who claim that solving a word puzzle is its own reward are mad. It's true that getting the word in three tries is better than taking all six, but that doesn't mean much without context. Context here means the relative success or failure of people you know. In Gore Vidal's immortal words, 'It's not enough to succeed, others must fail'.
It's hard, though, to be properly competitive about a game where so much depends on your luck with your first guess. I write this with some feeling because my daughter once completed a Wordle in two goes, and I've never done better than three guesses in eleven attempts. Despite artfully using vowel-maximizing words like adieu, pious and irate, and cannily making sure that my first two guesses always include that half-vowel 'y' (which less clever people fail to do), I'm forced to make my peace with the humiliating fact that Twitter and WhatsApp are littered with undeserving players trumpeting their two-guess triumphs.
Perhaps it isn't luck. Perhaps the game rewards risk-takers over methodical players who play the percentages. I feel like Federer who once complained about Djokovic slamming a low-percentage winner at match-point at the US Open. Who does that, he asked, disgruntled. It can't be luck when some people consistently get the right word in three guesses or less; people with smaller vocabularies, lower IQs, manifestly more vulgar reading habits and fewer degrees.
How? If it isn't luck, there must be a trick to it, a cheat code, available only to millennials and other digital natives. As a boomer, who cut his lexical teeth on Scrabble, I sometimes miss the malevolent charge of a multi-player word game where most of your energy is spent playing spoilsport. Most of the time though, the more gentle rivalry of Wordle sustains me.
The one part of Wordle that doesn't work is its 'Hard' mode. In the Hard mode, you are forced to include the letters you've guessed right in subsequent guesses. It's a mistake for two reasons. One, it offends against the game's absolute simplicity which demands a uniform user experience. Two, it doesn't work on its own terms. Reusing a correctly guessed letter is often the strategically sensible thing to do. It helps you, for example, to get its location right. To suggest that the freedom to use an entirely new set of letters is an advantage is just misleading. Wordle's USP is that it is self-explanatory; anything that makes it even a little bit arcane, like the Hard setting, isn't right.
Not self-explanatory enough for some, though. Tim Shipman, who writes for the Sunday Times, tells a great Wordle story against himself on Twitter. "I've now tried Wordle four times. I am yet to get a single yellow letter, let alone a green. I am done." A while later he tweets again: "Turns out I wasn't pressing enter..."
Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in Delhi. His most recent book is 'Homeless on Google Earth' (Permanent Black, 2013).
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.