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Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, knew his partner loved word games, so he created a guessing game just for the two of them. He named it as a play on surnames. word.
But after the couple played for months and introduced to their relatives and quickly became an obsession in his family’s WhatsApp group, Mr Wardle thought something might be up and posted it to the rest of the world in October.
On November 1, 90 people played.
On Sunday, just over two months later, more than 300,000 people played.
It’s been a meteoric rise for the once-a-day game that invites players to guess a five-letter word in a manner similar to the guessing color game Mastermind. After guessing a five-letter word, the game tells you if any of your letters are in the hidden word and are in the right place. You have six attempts to get it right.
Few of these popular corners of the Internet are as unassuming as the website that Mr. Wardle built himself as a side project. No ads or flashing banners; no windows open or asking for money. There is only the game on the black background.
“I think people appreciate that there is something fun on the internet,” Mr Wardle said in an interview on Monday. “It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or eyeballs. It’s just a fun game.”
This isn’t Mr Wardle’s first brush to suddenly gain widespread attention. Formerly a software engineer for Reddit, he created two collaborative social experiments on the site. Button and Place, each was phenomenal in its own moment.
But Wordle was built without a team of engineers. It was just him and his partner Palak Shah during a pandemic.
Mr Wardle said he first created a similar prototype in 2013, but his friends were not impressed and scrapped the idea. In 2020, he and Ms. Shah “really got involved” in The New York Times Spelling Contest and daily puzzle“So I wanted to find a game that he would enjoy,” she said.
The breakthrough said is to limit players to one game per day. He said this was partly inspired by Spelling Bee and created a sense of scarcity that he said made people want more.
Word games proved Extremely popular for The Times and other companies in recent years and many companies such as Spelling Bee loyal fan following.
But since Wordle was originally only built for Mr Wardle and Ms Shah, the initial design ignored many of the growth hacking features that were nearly expected from games in the current era. While other games send notifications to your phone in hopes that you’ll be back during the day, Wordle doesn’t want an intense engagement.
“It’s something that encourages you to take three minutes a day,” he said. “And that’s it. Like, he doesn’t want any more of your time than that.”
Wordle lacked the ability to share results until mid-December. Mr. Wardle noticed that players were sharing their results by typing in a grid of green, yellow and black emojis, so he developed an automated way for players to brag about their achievements in a spoiler-free way.
If he had optimized the game to win as many players as possible, he would have added a link to the end of the tweet the tool generated, he said. After reviewing it, however, he said it would look “trash” that wasn’t visually compelling, and he liked the enigmatic aura of the grill that he felt drew people’s attention to.
Mr Wardle said that although Ms. Shah was the lucky recipient of the first game, she played an important role in preparing the game for the public. The first list of all five-letter words in the English language – about 12,000 – contained many obscure words that were almost impossible to guess.
So he created another game for Ms. Shah: This time, he would rank those 12,000 or so words to determine if he knew them. This reduced the list of Wordle words to about 2,500, which should have taken several years. (A few words already angered fans: Some were upset by REBUS and TAPIR, saying they weren’t familiar enough.)
Shah says he wakes up every day with a new routine: He’s warming up with the Spelling Bee that blows his mind for Wordle. He also loves the New York Times Crossword and cipher puzzles.
While Wordle is now being shared with the world, she said she appreciates that Mr Wardle actually created it for her.
“It’s really cute,” he said. “Josh is definitely showing his love that way.”
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