Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

by vaghetti • 4 years ago

456 263 4 years ago

Nice insights. A few good design decisions multiply together to make Wordle irresistible to both gamers and non-gamers.

cdubzzz2• 4 years ago

I'm a huge fan of the plain text share functionality that Wordle uses (introduced?). Loving it in the various clones that are coming out as well and I hope it becomes a common "simple share" approach in other applications.

valtism• 4 years ago

The share functionality was actually taken from a twitter user who started posting her results in that format. It's a very clever way to show your journey without spoiling the results, and almost certainly had a big impact on the virality of the game.

afavour• 4 years ago

One of my favourite features of Wordle is that the share functionality uses the Web Share API. It’s been available cross platform for a while now but this is the first truly huge use I’ve seen and I think a lot of the games success is because of it.

cdubzzz2• 4 years ago

Oh, cool! I did not realize that. Will have to take a closer look at it…

sam1r2• 4 years ago

I agree with OP. Not enough credit goes to how simple, but great of a product Wordle is.

jcims• 4 years ago

I think it’s about as close to a local maxima as any software product I’ve ever used.

mcenedella2• 4 years ago

Exactly!!

mcenedella2• 4 years ago

The OP does a terrific job detailing the simple beauty of Wordle.

Is it OK if we like it more because it was born out of love?: ‘Wordle is a love story’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-ga...

And in the space of a month went from ‘introduced in NY Times’ to ‘bought by NY Times’?

‘The New York Times Buys Wordle’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/business/media/new-york-t...

In many ways, I think this is the perfected ideal of what engineer-creators hope for.

The intense focus on making something that feels magical for one - even better that that one is magical to you.

Sharing the creation with a few friends and having them experience the magic too.

And having the world recognize, and then pay $ millions, for your creation done in the name of love.

No years lost in the lab, no fighting with corporate suits to keep ads out, no long marches of ‘growth’ tactics that feel icky.

It is the Romantic Ideal of Engineering.

Does any other story come close?

kyawzazaw• 4 years ago

Maybe this - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/25/summly-so...

chairmanwow1• 4 years ago

Summly was an amazing thing

bobthepanda2• 4 years ago

Stardew Valley doesn‘t have nearly as short of a timeframe but is another labor of love success.

marricks• 4 years ago

I think it's an even better personal success than Wordle, or at least different. It was a man's labor of love for years, which tied together all his interests: music, art, programming, games.

And better yet he built a career out of doing all of those things and still owns and maintains it years later. Presumably still loves it too.

NicoJuicy2• 4 years ago

If you looked at the engineer of worldle, he tried a lot of similar games before eg. On mobile.

Dating back since 2013.

So, while it could be created in a short timeframe. A lot of experience/thinking went into it.

Edit: changed 2016 to 2013

sam1r2• 4 years ago

> Does any other story come close?

What about Mailbox [2013] being shut-down after Dropbox acquisition? [0]

I feel like many of gmail's archive and swipe-shortcuts are heavily inspired by Mailbox.

[0] https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/dropbox-just-killed-mailbo...

glandium• 4 years ago

MKBHD interviewed Josh Wardle, the author of Wordle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_e2IEaR4aA&t=1008s

Gatsky• 4 years ago

Yes this is it isn't it, it is clear how much the motivation matters in the case of Wordle. As it does, in a converse sense, for the games trying to extract as much money as possible from the user.

egypturnash2• 4 years ago

It also brings players back into the game, but not in an annoying way like Farmville Facebook notifications.

As someone who doesn't play, it's getting more and more annoying. Especially now that there's stuff like Wordle Except It's Four Games At Once demanding space on my social timelines.

alanbernstein• 4 years ago

Sounds like it's actually the social timelines that annoy you.

skinnymuch• 4 years ago

Couldn’t FB notifications be blocked before? Which is similar then to saying social timeline vs the game. Not the same, I agree.

egypturnash2• 4 years ago

Well yes but that is a whole other rant. It’s been right under the threshold of “annoying enough to remember how to mute a phrase in Twitter’s web client” for a while.

harry-wood2• 4 years ago

Yeah "not in an annoying way" is certainly debatable. Personally I'm not annoyed by it, but I can see why people would be. Whoever made this spoiler bot seemed pretty annoyed by it :-) https://twitter.com/dancow/status/1485660308622528513

DangitBobby• 4 years ago

We have a "game" channel in our friend discord channel (like 10 or so if us). All interesting content has been completely drowned out with wordle shares, and there's no end in sight. I'm glad people are having fun, but I would like that channel back.

bink• 4 years ago

If it weren't this game it would be something else. I remember Animal Crossing dominating all video game discussions for weeks or months at a time.

Karunamon• 4 years ago

Good use for Discord's thread feature. Take the last one someone posted and launch a thread on it and ask people to post their scores there.

codeflo• 4 years ago

Good design is often subtle and easy to dismiss, especially for smart engineers. You might remember the "What's the deal? It's just mastermind with letters" comments here and elsewhere. I agree with the article that Wordle got many little things right, and I think that's a huge part of its success.

I wonder how long it will stay that way under NY Times ownership. Just today, I was greeted with a new cookie prompt that covered up the keyboard on mobile Safari and wouldn't disappear without a refresh. Not a good sign of things to come.

ehsankia9• 4 years ago

It's coming one step at a time. First the subtle side bar linking to their other games. They diverged from the answer list. Next they removed all bad words from the dictionary like "bitch" and so on. Now the cookie stuff.

prewett• 4 years ago

One of the subtle ways he didn't mention is that the words seem to use medium-frequency letters, so they aren't an obvious guess, but it isn't some word with no vowels or a bunch of z's, either. I did notice that after the NYT took over the words now seem to have fewer letters, so it's more necessary to logic out which word it is if you want a good score. Previously I could figure out what most of the letters were with three words, but now I have to work at it. At least until I can come up with well-chosen words for the new regime.

AutumnCurtain• 4 years ago

The day "jazzy" is chosen is the day Wordle makes some enemies

mango72835• 4 years ago

To be clear, even if the NYT never took over, those words would still have come up, the nyt only removed 6 words, which is a very small amount.

Didn't stop people from saying the NYT gentrified the game after tacit came up though, which is it's own commentary on facts and fact finding and confirmation bias

moskie2• 4 years ago

I've also begun to thing of Wordle as a meme. I know virtually anything could be framed as a meme, but there's specific aspects of Wordle and its rise in popularity that make it a particularly apt description. Its viral spread was fast and resonant. It's super easy to consume. Think pieces dissecting it end up in mainstream publications. The story about its origin gets mythologized.

And, most importantly: unending riffs on the base meme. There's basically infinite Wordle clones with slightly (or very) different rules. And the shared results themselves can be riffed on as well. It's done a thing that's usually reserved for image memes: it's created a whole new language that people are using to make fun(ny) things.

It's just really interesting to see that happen with a game.

bobthepanda2• 4 years ago

Flappy bird? Temple run?

moskie2• 4 years ago

Yup, totally right. Don't have much experience with Temple Run and its clones, but Flappy Bird fits the bill. The fact that there's only a couple games that come to mind reinforces the novelty of it happening again with Wordle though.

zanecodes• 4 years ago

Another cool instance of this was 2048, when it first came out. I was in college at the time, and for at least a month you could see a half dozen or more games of 2048 on the screens of any given classroom's laptops.

micromacrofoot• 4 years ago

This was a good look back at 2048/Threes and all the clones

https://www.theverge.com/22914955/threes-2048-ketchapp-copyc...

TeaVMFan5• 4 years ago

Having implemented my own 5-letter word game, I can agree that much finesse lies under the covers. Wordii is for the impatient, letting you play more often if you choose:

https://frequal.com/wordii/

The many subtleties of this genre make it a great programming challenge. I encourage developers to try making their own version. I think you'll come away with a healthy respect for Mr. Wardle.

phenylene• 4 years ago

Nice work! Dark mode?

TeaVMFan5• 4 years ago

That will be a fun addition. Especially since Wordii is designed for longer play, that makes sense. Expect to see it soon. Thanks!

twobitshifter• 4 years ago

I have a reasonable vocabulary but I just got the word “copra”. I did get it on the sixth try but only after guessing cobra and realizing there were no letters left that produced words I knew. According to Wikipedia “Copra is the dried coconut kernels of which coconut oil is expelled.” It might be a blind spot in my vocabulary but I haven’t had this happen with wordle. The accessible word list could be considered another genius element of its design.

TeaVMFan5• 4 years ago

Yes, designing a dictionary that is both challenging and reasonable is another challenge for games like this. I made a pass through the dictionary after earlier HN feedback, adding some words for guessing and removing some more obscure words. I'll make another pass.

Thanks for the feedback!

TeaVMFan5• 4 years ago

Oh, I almost forgot, after a Wordii game is over, the word is shown as a hyperlink below the puzzle. The link takes you directly to the definition of the word.

Rayhem• 4 years ago

I just played and failed, only to get "Sorry, the word was GIBBY" with a link to the "definition" of GIBBY[1] on dictionary.com. Spoiler alert: according to dictionary.com, GIBBY isn't a word.

[1] https://www.dictionary.com/misspelling?term=GIBBY

TeaVMFan5• 4 years ago

I have removed it, thank you.

nemo44x• 4 years ago

Fun game but becomes fairly automatic when you know the best words to start with.

ghaff6• 4 years ago

There are probably a dozen or two starting words that are probably good choices depending on your strategy but not sure I'd call it automatic at that point.

function_seven2• 4 years ago

So don't start with those words. Or, force yourself each day to start with one you haven't used yet. That's what I do. I now forget what the "optimal" word is (STARE? AISLE?), but my first guess usually has something like a B or F in it. While it's not optimal generally, it is satisfying when you get the word in 2 or 3 guesses because you lucked into the right initial guess.

AndresNavarro• 4 years ago

But once you get pretty good at it you can choose to start with a suboptimal word, like a handicap.

mecha_ghidorah• 4 years ago

I pick a different start word each day to help keep it fresh

I have a friend who always users yesterdays word as their first guess

jbmny• 4 years ago

That feels like yet another aspect of Wordle's appeal to me: the fact that it starts with a "clean slate", where you can enter any word you want. It's an opportunity for creativity, spontaneity, and serendipity. One of my favorite parts of the game is pulling that first word out of the air.

ghaff6• 4 years ago

I actually think the OP and the comments are too focused on the programmer-related aspects of this. I'll add a few things.

1. It's not trivial but it's not that hard if you have a decent vocabulary and some intuitive sense for word frequencies (and word pair frequencies) for different locations in a word. The answer list does not seem to include really hard words as naively picking all the words in the MW dictionary would be. It's a fun 10-15 minute puzzle.

2. Five letter seems like something of a sweet spot.

3. The answer word list does not appear to have a lot of plurals or common vowel endings for past tense, etc. Or obscure words.

4. It lends itself to what I'll casual cheating, i.e. there are easy ways to get some hints without giving the answers away while focusing on a strategy.

5. Basically, it's got good gameplay for a casual game. It would be easy to build something along similar lines that didn't have as fun gameplay for a casual gamer.

jasonpeacock• 4 years ago

#1 is why it's so successful. It's just challenging enough to make you think, but still solvable by most people. So we all get that nice dopamine rush of solving a puzzle with a reasonable perceived effort.

How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words? There is a very devoted fan base for crossword, but it's not as universal as Wordl's adoption.

To me, that's the genius - just hard enough, but not too hard. It's not a Scrabble competition, it's a fun diversion and shared challenge to experience with your friends.

ghaff6• 4 years ago

I'm actually sort of a "word" person. I've written books for publishers and do a fair bit of writing for my job. But crosswords have always fallen into the too much work category for me and I've never really connected to word games in general (including Scrabble).

But, yeah, I like Wordle and it hits a sweet spot for me.

harry-wood2• 4 years ago

"reasonable perceived effort" or maybe "reasonable perceived smarts". I think wordle fools us into thinking we're smart. Even though on some level we know it cannot take genius, it _feels_ like we've done something really clever, against the odds, when when we whittle down the possibilities to one word after just few guesses. It's counter-intuitive how quickly we solve it. Reminds me of the birthday paradox.

heyheyhey• 4 years ago

How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words?

The NYT Crossword Minis is actually really popular within my friend group. It's usually about 8-10 words.

moritonal• 4 years ago

Whilst solvable, there's still a skill differential in the scoreboard. So in group-chats, everyone "solves" it, but the person who does it in 2 gets to celebrate (but a chunk of it is luck so it rotates a bit).

thekiptxt• 4 years ago

The relationship of wordle to cheating is underrated. The fact that it’s so astoundingly easy to cheat (the daily word is global), and falsify your game board (just text) makes dishonesty completely undesirable. If you post 1/1, people will assume you hit the once-a-year lucky first guess, or that you’re cheating. There are no high scores, no leaderboards, no reason other than personal satisfaction to work through the puzzle.

ghaff6• 4 years ago

I'm more talking that if you're stuck, it's extremely easy to go to a generic online dictionary and enter some parameters and get to see some options. So you can still be playing a strategy but just not come up with a potential word yourself. It's not about going on social media with your hole in one.

function_seven2• 4 years ago

4. It lends itself to what I'll casual cheating, i.e. there are easy ways to get some hints without giving the answers away while focusing on a strategy.

I like this part. I’m in a 5-person group text where we’re posting our scores every day. Sometimes I’m the first, oftentimes not. When I happen to see a couple of others’ results in the thread, I’ll start to think about what they would have guessed with whatever pattern they posted. Like if I see ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ _ ⬛ , and I’m struggling between guessing "CHART" or "CHANT", I’ll go with CHANT because I assume they went with CHART first.

duskwuff• 4 years ago

Along those lines, here's a data analysis pipeline someone put together to guess the current Wordle word based solely on the patterns of guesses in tweets:

https://www.kaggle.com/benhamner/wordle-1-6

dave5104• 4 years ago

This is even worse (depending on how much you mind cheating, hah) when you know the other person's usual "starting words".

bo1024• 4 years ago

#3 -- agree, the word list is also really nice. A bunch of plurals or conjugated verbs would really bring down the experience. But that would have been easy to overlook.

EdwardDiego4• 4 years ago

On #1 - humph was hard for me, I've never encountered it in my reading (maybe I'm not reading a particular genre that uses it? Is it something Jane Austen used?), only got it via a a last ditch guess, because I'm familiar with "harrumph" and I had "-umph" already and "h" was the only prefix that remotely made any kind of sense.

ehsankia9• 4 years ago

The wordlist definitely isn't perfect, and obviously each person has their own vocabulary, but it still is a key. It's something the creator mentions, if on your first play you run into a stupid word, you probably won't come back the next day. And the fact that the current word list is 1/th the total word count goes to show how many words are ridiculous.

AFAIK his partner actually sifted through all 13k word list and categorized all of them into 3-4 buckets, which is what lead to the final 2.5k answer list.

ghaff6• 4 years ago

Now that I've looked it up I'm "Oh sure." I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have thought of it as a dictionary word or something you would write outside of dialog however.

friendzis• 4 years ago

3. The answer word list does not appear to have a lot of plurals or common vowel endings for past tense, etc. Or obscure words.

I guess it depends on one's vocabulary, but for non-native speaker it sure does have some obscure words and more importantly technical terms. For example TRUSS. While not exactly an "obscure" word, unless one has familiarity with technical construction terminology non-native speaker most probably is not familiar with such a word. It is just not a word one would expect to appear in a fiction book, film or casual conversation.

dvirsky5• 4 years ago

The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity.

You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from.

The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involved in making you play one game per day, no server side calls are involved in gameplay at all. And yes, this means that changing your time zone will let you play tomorrow's game, and that you can just view source to know tomorrow's word - it appears right after today's word in the code.

This is so counter to how we usually design software in so many ways, it's just delightful.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan2• 4 years ago

Making the whole thing client side also let him scale from a small handful of users to literally millions with basically zero additional work.

I hope it inspires future devs to let go of feeling like they absolutely need to beg or require users to create accounts to capture email addresses just so they have a chance at monetizing their thing. Wordle may not have ever caught on if it were preemptively over-engineered: it could've added friction to the onboarding, the site could crash, etc.

You can just build a great MVP and let it loose into the world, then see what happens.

yen2232• 4 years ago

I wish I were smart enough to coin a catchy phrase that means "the moment some software dropped in quality, when they decided to add user accounts", because I see this quite a lot.

I'm looking at you, Postman!

com2kid2• 4 years ago

Making the whole thing client side also let him scale from a small handful of users to literally millions with basically zero additional work.

But everyone on HN is telling me that I should move away from client side and render everything server side! In fact, all state should be server side! Use a fancy library that opens a web socket and turn the users 4+core computer into a mindless zombie controlled by a .25CPU VM somewhere.

koliber• 4 years ago

They could have at least thrown in a microservice or two to breathe some air into that fad.

julianwachholz• 4 years ago

Removing any friction for new users or players is such a huge deal, more sites should embrace this approach. Similar to how Facebook created ghost users for everyone, why not make this explicit? There are a number of plugins for popular web frameworks that create temporary user accounts for each visitor, allowing them to use the site just like a regular user. This way it's a bit more sophisticated than plain old sessions which allows it to be integrated in existing sites as well.

And if the visitor abandons the site their data will just be garbage-collected after a while.

hombre_fatal• 4 years ago

When I first discovered Wordle, I immediately looked for a way to keep playing with new random words, something that most clones have implemented.

After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab when I was stumped.

Had I invented Wordle, I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day which is surely one of the critical elements of its success.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan2• 4 years ago

The daily bit is clearly modeled off the New York Times daily word puzzles, and it's obvious why the NYT bought it to add it to their collection of daily word games.

ehsankia9• 4 years ago

After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun.

Absolutely. If that limitation wasn't there, the game would've definitely fizzled out within days and maybe even never made to it the popularity it has now. The slow sustained popularity, with people posting their results on the shared daily word is the key to success here.

It's the only reason people are still talking about it more than a month later.

prawn2• 4 years ago

I have been playing Quordle as well, and now find Wordle very slow and dull. I'll persist as long as my streak is active (60+ or whatever) but bail if it breaks. I play 10-20 games of Quordle a day and find it more interesting, challenging with IMO more difficult words, etc.

But I can appreciate that one shared round was key to Wordle being noticed.

frutiger• 4 years ago

Had I invented Wordle, I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day

This is the core mechanic of a newspaper crossword (or the NYT Spelling Bee) which inspired Wordle. It’s really no surprise when you think of it that way.

chrischen• 4 years ago

This mechanic you describe is actually quite common in freemium games. Games like Farmville don’t let you burn yourself out and purposely make you wait and come back hours or days later to get that dope rush.

amelius• 4 years ago

Had I invented Wordle, I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day which is surely one of the critical elements of its success.

It's probably the same with Twitter's char limit.

jrockway• 4 years ago

I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day which is surely one of the critical elements of its success

It's different anyway, but how are people building routines around remembering to visit a certain website once a day? Do they just see the shares on Twitter and remember to go play themselves? Do they bookmark it? I certainly can't build a routine around a novelty like Wordle.

Morizero• 4 years ago

In some ways it reminds me of Twitter - the innovation was in restricting the content, not in adding more features.

bsimpson• 4 years ago

I forgot to play one day, so at just after midnight, I set my TZ to Hawaii to catch up. After I finished, I set it back to PST.

When I went to play the next day's game, it acted like I had already solved the puzzle at midnight. I had to manually edit localStorage to fix my state (or presumably skip a game).

This was when it was still hosted on Josh's site, but be weary of changing TZs to get other day's puzzles. The game might get confused.

suzzer992• 4 years ago

Yeah I had the same thing happen. I would jump ahead two hours to play it at night. This morning it kept showing me the same 3-day-old game, no matter what I did. I had to clean out cache, local storage, cookies and everything to finally get it to start playing again.

pdpi• 4 years ago

No cookies are involved in making you play one game per day

The game does, however, use local storage to keep your score, and progress along today’s puzzle.

dvirsky5• 4 years ago

Sure, what I meant is that even if you delete your cookies you'll play the same round.

Cthulhu_• 4 years ago

This is so counter to how we usually design software in so many ways, it's just delightful.

It's letting go of notions of what makes good code. I had a Moment like that doing Pico-8, since you can only fit 40 or so characters on screen, all the tutorials just use dirty, single or two letter variable names, and since everything is small and you learn a few neat tricks about variables (velocity, coordinates, the mod operator), the code can be really compact... and filthy. It's great.

scambier3• 4 years ago

If you like the code-golfing aspect of it, I suggest you take a look at the #tweetcart hashtag on Twitter, there are some incredible demos in 280 chars or less.

the_af7• 4 years ago

I think the full list of words being hardcoded and readily available is not a kind of elegant simplicity, but simply an inelegant compromise to get everything done client-side, which has obvious benefits. It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation.

neoberg• 4 years ago

Why tho? Cheating just takes away from the cheater's experience and doesn't affect anyone else. It's pretty much like any physical game. You can play (or cheat) it any way you like even though the game is designed to be played in a certain way.

zild3d2• 4 years ago

an inelegant compromise ... It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation

What would you change specifically? Adding an API call backed by servers / lambdas? The creator mentioned it costs in the tens of dollars per month to run wordle for 10s of millions of daily players. Having to run servers would not only add a ton of cost, but now be vulnerable to latency spikes, ddos, downtime.

Wordle scaled to 10s of millions in a few months, without any latency or downtime. Pretty elegant in my book.

mmcnl3• 4 years ago

Every design decision is a compromise. "Inelegant" is simply another word for "I would've done in it a different way".

senectus1• 4 years ago

the only design flaw i see is that the color blind mode colors are not intuitive choices.

I'm not color blind but I play with some friends who are, I have to switch color pallets to share results.

in color blind mode its light blue for right letter wrong spot and orange for right letter right spot. mentally, to me this is the wrong war around.. and it drives me nuts and forces mistakes on my end.

benrapscallion• 4 years ago

An important aspect isn’t mentioned: the words are five letter words that even my six year old kid can attempt.

xiphias2• 4 years ago

Also us secondary people (the majority) whose English is not native. My first thinking when I tried wordle was that for sure it's a word that I don't know...but all the words in the main list are known by us as well.

mango72835• 4 years ago

None of them that I've seen are those crazy Scrabble words no one uses, which is a really really great thing about wordles curation.

richardatlarge• 4 years ago

Did you know… that if you use a letter multiple times but it’s used fewer than that, the extra letters are grayed out - this surprised me but it’s correct to do it

jrochkind1• 4 years ago

I'm surprised how infrequently I see anyone commenting on the wordle tile-flipping animation.

It's... really nice? I like to watch it. I suspect I'm not alone, and if the tiles simply changed color in an instant without animation, wordle would not be as successful.

lanewinfield• 4 years ago

Agreed. And the feeling of suspense and subsequent satisfaction when they slowly flip all to green is a dopamine hit in and of itself.

taeric• 4 years ago

My favorite thing in this is that it is easily recreated with about fifteen lines of css. Truly a very well crafted animation that fully builds on the joy of seeing the reveal.

Edit: realized my point seems reductionist. I meant that to be that it is not just a technical marvel. The artistic choices that went into building it are truly impressive.

Forricide• 4 years ago

Josh Wardle, creator of Wordle, was interviewed on the Syntax podcast and they discussed exactly this. I'd paraphrase the segment (it was a really interesting bit on design philosophy) but I don't remember it quite well enough so I'd probably butcher it. But, suffice it to say the creator agrees.

romellem• 4 years ago

The creator added this specifically to add some “juice,” a phrase from the talk [Juice It or Lose It][1], where they describe it as meaning:

A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do, tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input.

He talked about this as the end of a [podcast][2] he was recently the guest on, Syntax

[1] https://youtu.be/Fy0aCDmgnxg

[2] https://syntax.fm/show/430/creator-of-wordle-josh-wardle

mrtksn• 4 years ago

It's called "juice it or lose it"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

wanderer_2• 4 years ago

Great thread up in here....

I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said.

wanderer_2• 4 years ago

I seem to have violated the community guidelines. Apologies...

14• 4 years ago

I manage to get the word on my last try and it was very satisfying. I've never seen this game before. I was a little sad you only get one word a day.

aklemm• 4 years ago

So fun to see someone start the journey. Enjoy.

d--b2• 4 years ago

You can’t explain its success by product greatness only.

I mean sure wordle is fine. But the no-ad and once-a-day features are what the new york times has been doing for years (and yes it works really well). There are probably _thousands_ of other mini games that are no-ad and once-a-day.

The sharing part is pretty cool. It does encourage bragging and probably played a big role in its virality. But yet again, there must be plenty of other games that do that well (and we’ll likely see an awful lot more of them).

Again I do think that wordle is pretty good, but its success is more easily explained by lucky timing and reaching some big influencers early rather than amazingly smart design.

The reason I am posting this is that I think people shouldn’t think that if they build something as good they will have the same success. And I find it a bit dishonest to say “oh of course it had some success, it’s so great” after the fact.

Kiro2• 4 years ago

I think it's more than luck. Wordle was made by the same guy that created r/place and The Button so he clearly knows how to make viral things.

d--b2• 4 years ago

Well, this also means that he already has a certain visibility, which definitely helps kickstart virality.

scaramanga• 4 years ago

Thanks. It's hard to say this without feeling like you're taking away people's moment of being happy about a rare example when someone got lucky who we feel really deserved it. But I think you're quite right, we can't take it as proof that good things succeed or that bad things must fail. And it doesn't hurt to be gently reminded of that reality, especially in these moments.

sedatk3• 4 years ago

I'd mentioned how Wordle clones failed to copy its success because they didn't understand what made it unique before, the article does a decent job too: https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1481734261434507268

ehsankia9• 4 years ago

I don't think it's entirely true. Many have managed to create alternatives that have gotten serious traction. There's a few I've been consistently playing for a week and honestly enjoying more than Wordle itself.

I've been playing Quordle, and sometimes it's more insane alternatives [1] [2]. I've also really been enjoying Semantle [3], it's probably one of my favorite and most unique ones. There's other ones that are also need but maybe too much, like Squabble [4] and Squardle [5], but I wouldn't say they've all failed.

Also, to say "the game itself is mediocre at best" seems ridiculous. A mediocre game doesn't get popular purely based on once a day and sharing...

[0] https://quordle.com/

[1] https://octordle.com/

[2] https://sedecordle.com/

[3] https://semantle.novalis.org/

[4] https://squabble.me/

[5] https://fubargames.se/squardle/

Mogzol• 4 years ago

I've really been enjoying Quordle. When I first saw it I thought it was just another clone with an interesting gimmick, but something about it just works so well, it's really fun to play. Going back to the original Wordle almost seems boring afterwards.

sedatk3• 4 years ago

Mastermind and alike have existed in many different forms over decades. None of them became as popular as Wordle, not even close. It's been mediocre and outdated for a long time. But, Wordle has features that makes it unique, welcoming, and viral. The alternatives you quote aren't even close. That doesn't mean none of them can catch up with Wordle. I was saying that most of them was getting it wrong (like removing daily word limits, making the game harder, more convoluted, asking for signup, adding ads, etc). Nope. That's not going to work.

hyperpallium2• 4 years ago

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordle

mechanics are nearly identical to the 1955 pen-and-paper game Jotto and the US television game show Lingo

He had created a similar prototype in 2013, the prototype allowed for endless play, with players able to play puzzles immediately after each other, and its wordlist was unfiltered.

In mid-October 2021, he made it public after it "rapidly became an obsession" with relatives

The game became a viral phenomenon on Twitter in late December 2021, after Wardle added a sharing element to the game, letting users copy their results in the form of a grid of colored square emoji. The feature was inspired by a group of friends from New Zealand

croes• 4 years ago

Mastermind with words.

It's success reminds me of Flappy Bird. It's a mass phenomenon not a great game.

zgs• 4 years ago

Wordle is a spam engine. The game isn't that difficult -- it's been solved by several folks and it can always be won. The "share" button is the spam engine.

If you play to enjoy it and don't press "share", well done. If you press "share", be ready to burn in the level of hell reserved for spammers.

Fortunately, the NYT will screw this up and try to monetise it which will destroy its popularity in a short time.

shp0ngle• 4 years ago

No ads, no log-in

No ads, no log-in so far

syntaxing• 4 years ago

I think it’s also worth noting that the creator of Wordle was also the creator or Reddit place. His ideas are pretty novel and interesting

GCA102• 4 years ago

One more factor in Wordle's popularity that I haven't yet seen commentators identify much. The game's word roster tilts heavily toward words with neutral or cheerful connotations.

So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words.

Instead, we get the likes of AWAKE, BLUSH, FOCAL, etc. That helps make the game a mood-stabilizer or even brightener. We're usually clever enough to find a solution most days. When we're slow and need all six turns, we get a cheery "Whew!" to console us. It's a simple, barely noticeable bit of gamification at its nicest.

alskdjflaskjdhf• 4 years ago

One more factor in Wordle's popularity that I haven't yet seen commentators identify much. The game's word roster tilts heavily toward words with neutral or cheerful connotations.
So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words.

Ironically, SLAVE was actually one of the future solution words in Wordle pre-acquisition. The NYT removed it from the planned solutions.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/15/22934587/wordle-solutions...

danachow• 4 years ago

They removed it from the master dictionary as well.

hddqsb• 4 years ago

In fact VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE are all in the (original) solution list.

deckard1• 4 years ago

Valentine's Day was CYNIC, which I did find humorous.

neltnerb• 4 years ago

I don't know if this is relevant, but it's been driving me nuts.

Wordle is a game that was on the speak and spell in like 1990. It had a different name. It taught me how to spell a lot of words, and especially about patterns of where letters are found.

It was actually my favorite game on the toy at the time, so maybe that says something about it just being a fairly fun game whether you get one word or not... I totally support turning this into an educational game for elementary school kids though, that really seems like how it's a smart game. It teaches you not just spelling but how letters combine, it's amazing.

edit: Let them get addicted to spelling instead of, I dunno, youtube. For adults maybe one a day totally makes sense. For kids? Let them go wild.

o_____________o• 4 years ago

I've been enjoying worLdle:

https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/

ep103• 4 years ago

quordle is where its at

robbiep3• 4 years ago

Effectively there are 2 wordles at the moment - the my times link has a different word and I was using the old uk link and so my partner and I are having different words. Pretty funny/an opportunity to do the ‘crossword’ twice a day! (For however long they keep it up!)

TylerE• 4 years ago

It (the old version at least), is pure client-side... just download a copy and never worry about it going away.

robbiep3• 4 years ago

ooh interesting - thanks! running from the same seed do you think, or a list that will iterate in a consistent manner across other users?

dionidium• 4 years ago

In addition to everything else already discussed — the game is really well done, the sharing feature is inspired, the animations are delightful, etc — the thing about Wordle that makes it so universally popular is that it’s a very easy game that is experientially difficult. You have 6 guesses of 5 letters. There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet. Anyone in the top few deciles of verbal ability should hardly ever lose (if ever, really; I’ve played about 50 times and never “lost”). People further down in verbal ability will still win quite often.

And yet…it actually does engage your brain quite a bit! Despite being ultimately very easy, which people find rewarding, the experience feels challenging.

This is an odd combo. I’m having trouble thinking of any other games with this property. It’s more like a word search than a crossword puzzle. It takes work to complete a word search, but everybody has the tools to do it.

suzzer992• 4 years ago

I've lost when I got into a situation with three green letters, no yellow letters, and a ton of valid words remaining with the other 2 slots. Can happen with one open slot too.

qq662• 4 years ago

In that situation you don't keep guessing at the word... you enumerate the possibilities and guess a word that you know is wrong but will cut down your search space.

shawabawa32• 4 years ago

Unless you're playing on hard mode you can do a known wrong guess to eliminate more potential letters

gpvos• 4 years ago

Sharing a Wordle result is the first application of coloured emojis that has been useful to me. Laughing or crying faces and hearts are nice, but don't really offer much over text emoticons like :-), <3 and such. But this method of sharing was not possible before coloured boxes were available as characters.

Biganon• 4 years ago

My friends and I love Wordle. I made a Discord bot that picks a random French word every day at 8 AM and 8 PM, and we guess it in the chat. I added a rule so that you can't make two guesses in a row, in other words players must take turns making guesses, so one person cannot just brute force the game immediately.

We don't limit ourselves to 5 letter words, and it's really fun when the word is very long. Sometimes it takes a long time to find the word!

A weird issue is finding a list of words that contains every valid French word. It's harder than I thought. I'm not talking about the target words here, but the valid ones that you can use to guess. I thought the 300,000 word list I had found would be good enough, but some pretty basic words such as "Parabolique" are missing. The correct solution would probably be to use a dictionary file instead, instead of a plain list, but I'm not sure there's a python library to parse dictionary files, say the ones from libreoffice.

Also a fun bug was that since I use two completely different lists for the target words and the valid words (the target words list is a list of pretty common French words, it contains ten times fewer words than the valid words list, and it comes from another Internet source), there were words in the target word list but not the valid word list. Due to the order of the checks I do, the target word was deemed incorrect! My friends were certain they had found the correct word, the clues only allowed for one word, but it was rejected again and again. Now I've made sure the target word list is strictly a subset of the bigger list.

jgtrosh• 4 years ago

That's a good idea!

Of course, there's no easy way to share it with other people, since it has to be on a shared medium. For anyone else looking for a >5 letter French worldle, check out SUTOM [1]; it took me a while to try it out but the long words are a nice change and the motus sounds are delightful.

Please look again into libreoffice dic files, they're plain ASCII with a number of entries in the first line and you can probably s#/.*## the end of the lines (or maybe expand to include the alternate endings, as you wish).

[1] https://sutom.nocle.fr/

scambier3• 4 years ago

For you words list, you can look here: http://www.3zsoftware.com/fr/listes.php

blobbers• 4 years ago

That bit at the end about Senior Engineers seemed a little bit of a stretch.

thom• 4 years ago

If we’re honest, is Wordle not popular because it’s a trivially easy game just obfuscated enough to convince us we’ve done something clever each day? It’s only slightly more taxing than rolling a d6 and tweeting the result.

jdrc• 4 years ago

but not in an annoying way like Farmville Facebook notifications. Shared Wordle games actively improve your experience by adding a social factor.

It's no different than any other social games. It's still novel, so people don't call it annoying ... yet

I like the idea of sharing everywhere with a picture or emojis, because it means the game has no archive or hall of fame, which means users are incentivized to store it in their social media, which made it more viral. IT's a clever way to escape the limitations of social media platforms. But OTOH without archive or some long-term goal most people will find it pointless and give up soon.

The article seems to imply that wordle is the first game that did all those things. That's not true, each of those elements has been done before, but this game does contain a combination of them.

shawabawa32• 4 years ago

It is different because it doesn't link to anything, doesn't have a call to action, no "free gems!" etc

parentheses• 4 years ago

Author does hit the mark pointing out its elegance.

The game's word-size of 5 limits binging. I went back to play some of the first few words and found that I got sick of the game very quickly.

It'd be interesting to hear the creator of Wordle explain their decisions.

okonomiyaki3000• 4 years ago

I may be completely wrong but, after playing 3 or 4 times, I got the feeling that this game is very easy and involves more luck than skill or strategy. It looks and feels like a puzzle so you get the feeling of having solved something but have you, really? If you find the word in 3 tries 90% of the time, does it mean you're actually better at the game than someone who usually needs 4 or 5 attempts? Or are you just a little luckier?

lgas• 4 years ago

Over a small sample size it's impossible to say, but if you maintain those numbers after many games then yes, you are better. And there are a lot of opportunities for skill or strategy.

For example the choice of your first word matters a lot, should you plane something like ADIEU to get most of the vowels, or should you plane something like CRANE that has a lot of the popular consonants?

And then the biggest mistake I see people make is getting a lot of the letters in the right spot early and then just leaving them there on subsequent guesses. Instead you should be thinking about what types of words can be made with the letters you know about and then what types of whole new words that don't contain any of the letters that you know are correct will give you the most information about the letters you don't know... ideally your first few guesses should contain none of the same letters in order to to maximize the information you gain from each guess.

throw3434053• 4 years ago

And then the biggest mistake I see people make is getting a lot of the letters in the right spot early and then just leaving them there on subsequent guesses

You may be watching people play hard mode.

overlordalex• 4 years ago

And then the biggest mistake

Some might say the biggest mistake is not playing on hard mode ;)

Hard Mode Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses

I prefer hardmode as it prevents the sort of elimination strategies, and it feels more like a strategic game. However it does come back to bite you if you get 4 letters early on for a combination that has a lot of possible answers.

samhw• 4 years ago

And then the biggest mistake I see people make is getting a lot of the letters in the right spot early and then just leaving them there on subsequent guesses.

I just heard about this game for the first time from this thread, went to play it, and realised this on row #3 after initially wasting row #2. It made me want to go off and write an algorithm (I actually returned to the thread to see if anyone had written anything along those lines).

But I just realised this won't do, because your score depends not only on the last row but on the intervening ones too, so there's a perverse incentive to repeat the successful letters. That works nicely for non-programmers, but it made me think I'd prefer a purer game where the only 'cost function' is based on the correctness of your final guess. Or at least, that game would be quite fascinating to try and write an optimal algorithm for.

globular-toast• 4 years ago

There is a strategy, but I found it ridiculously easy to pick up. At first I was just guessing randomly and sometimes including double-letter words etc. Now I consistently get it in 3-4 guesses but my actual score seems to depend on luck. It feels like I've solved the puzzle and now just going through the motions doing it again and again. A bit like speed solving a Rubik's cube once you've figured out an algorithm maybe.

kuboble• 4 years ago

Rubik's cube speed-solver and wordle enthusiast here.

Wordle solving is considerably more demanding. It's more like trying to solve a cube in fewest moves. If I would have to compare mindlessness of speed cubing to a word-based activity it would be speed-typing.

cookie_monsta2• 4 years ago

Cool. Now you should try hard mode :)

scambier3• 4 years ago

I'd say it's 50% luck and 50% strategy. I have written my own clone, and my colleagues play it everyday and share their result. I can tell that some people are consistently _really_ good at it and never lost a single game, while some are average at best.

Of course, if you pick the right word in 3 tries or less, it's mostly luck. But beyond that, you have to plan a little bit ahead, recognize there are more possibilities than available lines, and act accordingly. That's when the game becomes interesting, and gives a little bit of dopamine. Finding the word in <= 3 tries is nice if you want to brag a bit, but not really satisfying. It's when you finally find it at your 5th or 6th try that it's pleasing.

teekert• 4 years ago

It's nice how things get "pretty damn smart" if you don't optimize for trackable eyeballs on ads.

nnoitra2• 4 years ago

Yet another flappy bird kind of a thing that caught on. It seems pretty boring to me and I don't wonder at all why I didn't have this idea first.

It's pretty much a crossword variation.

wesleywt• 4 years ago

Salty is a five letter word.

nnoitra2• 4 years ago

I mean I see it the same way as 2048. I don't think it's anything super-interesting and it's just something that has caught on.

somedude895• 4 years ago

It's also interesting in how modest and personal it is. There are no global scoreboards, so there's no "anonymous competitiveness." Nobody cares about your scores except your personal relationships, which allows it to not care about exploits.

qq662• 4 years ago

A lot of these are just observations about what you can do with a product when you're not trying to make money from it.

EGreg• 4 years ago

Am I the only one who doesn’t really get interested in Wordle even after all these explanations?

smuggle• 4 years ago

For those who want to ruin the fun, I threw together some javascript that gives you suggestions as you play. Link [1]. There are chrome extensions that probably do this better, but I had fun making this.

[1] https://gist.github.com/coertg/e8d0fc66c3a56a3c3490c77b7f812...

code_duck• 4 years ago

It’s extremely obvious that the person who made wordle killed it. What an admirable success.

wedgeantilles• 4 years ago

Thank you for mansplaining Wordle.

IgorPartola2• 4 years ago

What has been driving me a little nuts about it is the amount of luck involved with getting the word in a few tries. I can reliably get the word in 4 tries give or take. But when you hit something equivalent to *AR you can guess BAR, CAR, PAR, MAR, TAR, JAR, FAR, etc. The number of times I got 4 out of 5 letters on the second try just to finally get the word on the 5th or 6th try feels like I am cheated of a victory.

unfocussed_mike6• 4 years ago

Pretty inevitable, though; there are some letter groups in english that make that unavoidable.

I use this (the second table).

https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfr...

I memorised STARE/TASER, UNLID, CHOMP (all the letters with more than 3% incidence, in a word order with a good letter distribution close enough to the statistical one, and some useful letter groups) and the remaining significant ones(GBFYWKV) and work with that.

If I get a green from the first word I assemble a new word from the letters of the other two; this strategy has seen me guess it in two or three a bit more often.

This may be obvious but in your scenario where there are lots of permutations, it's worth considering that you can solve words two ways -- first by thinking of a word that fits the shape available, and second by carefully thinking of the words with the highest frequency unused letters in all available slots (if there are two or three remaining letters, a guess that is likely to provide you two yellows is vastly better than a guess that will provide you one green).

If you use a three word opening gambit (which you can't do in 'hard' mode) then you'll regularly guess it in four or five, anyway. I strongly suspect that four is the most common number of guesses for good players.

cookie_monsta2• 4 years ago

I keep in mind that OTHER NAILS contains the most common letters, but I play in hard mode and don't use either of those as a start word. My second guesses onwards are made up of clues shown and letters from those two words.

I don't understand the fun in playing easy mode and laying down words just to eliminate letters. I see a lot of people saying that it guarantees them a win in 4 moves, but once I adopted the above strategy I regularly started getting 2s and 3s. Four for me seems just ok, no big deal. At five I start making excuses/blaming the injustices of the game.

... and today I got a 5, so I will be signing the NYT petition, plus my elbow hurts /s

hashmush• 4 years ago

You could use one guess of BCP to gain more information. That'd eliminate 3-4 out of 7 words in your example with the tradeoffs that you won't win with that guess in particular, but it's better on average

unfocussed_mike6• 4 years ago

I agree that choosing a word that contains as many high frequency letters as possible to eliminate them is a good strategy.

Side note on P, B and C: in terms of five letter words, there are vanishingly few; maybe two or three? PUBIC is the only obvious one.

sloucher2• 4 years ago

I started playing an Wordle-like app to get around the one-per-day limitation (I know, sue me), and played probably dozens of rounds per day. I ended up with a simple strategy of always starting with the same 3 words: LAUGH, DIRTY, JOKES which cover all the vowels (and y) and put an S at the end where it's most likely to be found. Generally I can "waste" the first 3 guesses on those words and still find the solution.

Then one day, I typed LAUGH and got 5 greens on the first line! Had to happen eventually, but still...

unfocussed_mike6• 4 years ago

LAUGH, DIRTY, JOKES is good -- but no C/P/M/N which are all much more frequent than G/J/K/Y.

In my experience, Y is rarely difficult to place; it's almost always obvious when you're going to need it.

And you rarely need to think about J at all -- like with Q and Z, it's usually obvious when you need it. (Not many five letter english words have J anywhere apart from the first letter, and the few that do mostly have it in the second, like EJECT, or uncommonly the third, like MAJOR, though it might be more common in loanwords like BIJOU I guess).

wolframhempel• 4 years ago

Not directly related to the article, but I was just wondering what the best word to start wordle with is - and I think it is ATONE.

I arrived there by looking at the most frequent letters in english from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency and putting them into an anagram solver at https://www.thewordfinder.com/anagram-solver/

There is no five letter word from ETAOI (the five most frequent letters) but there are some from ETAOIN (the top six), namely atone, eatin, entia, oaten, tenia and tinea.

Wordle doesn't recognize most of these, but it does recognize atone

CamelCaseName• 4 years ago

Recently I watched two videos on how to solve Wordle using information theory by ThreeBlues1Brown

https://youtu.be/v68zYyaEmEA

https://youtu.be/fRed0Xmc2Wg

dubbel• 4 years ago

ATONE is a good one based on letter frequency - I wonder if letter position might lead you to another word, for example one that ends with "ed", "er" or "es". Or has an "e" as the second to last character?

Edit: I just read in a comment, plural or past tense words seem to be less common in the Wordle word set, so my example wouldn't make as much sense.

unfocussed_mike6• 4 years ago

I use STARE or TASER. Then UNLID and CHOMP :-)

shrx• 4 years ago

You can improve this guess by calculating the letter frequency for the 5-letter words only. With the dictionary that I use, the optimal word to start with is AROSE.

RegBarclay• 4 years ago

I try to use words that hit the Wheel of Fortune RSTLNE letters - BEAST, RUSTY, ROAST. It's served me pretty well. I haven't had to go beyond the 5th guess yet and commonly solve it in 4.

toss1• 4 years ago

>Some people say the biggest difference between an engineer and a senior engineer is not on the code they write, but on the senior engineer ability to figure out ways to not write code.

YES!!

The thing I spent the most time on when coding was to avoid writing code.

* All code takes longer to run than the no-op

* The greatest performance/speed gains are not from optimizing, but from entirely eliminating chunks of code.

* All code is habitat for bugs, the more habitat, the more...

* More code can unnecessarily obfuscate the structure of the app, and ability to reason about it

Some time later, the same principle came up in a seemingly very different field of sportscar racing, when my driving coach asked me "What are the things you do that slow the car down?". I thought of some mistakes I was making, but he pointed me to the big basics - "turning and braking", followed by discussion that the most basic thing to do was to avoid turning and braking. Now obviously, some of both will be needed as soon as you approach the end of the starting straight — the point is to do only the absolute minimum, and that often takes a LOT of work to figure out how to NOT do something.

Same applies for writing code - avoid it at all costs, and write only the absolutely required minimum.

It is effort well spent

Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

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