Wordle is the deceptively simple puzzle that became a global sensation last Christmas. The challenge: to create a rival
’m not resentful that the lightbulb didn’t go on in my head. My brother has been on hand with answers to my questions ever since I learned how to ask them – I basically consider his brain a handy extension of mine. In a way, Wordle was the product of a family collaboration, so I’m happy for this to be as well, and the unwitting involvement of my unborn nephew may yet go down in history.
Puzzles have a gap, something missing. People feel the compulsion to fill it. The aha moment when you get it is a little high A brief interlude, because these feelings are important. The sense of disappointment comes about when you violate the crucial “challenge-skill” balance, explains Joydeep Bhattacharya, a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London: “If the challenge is too much, you get frustrated. If the challenge is too low, then you’re literally bored.” If you can find the sweet spot, on the other hand, then you’ll have something that passes the time. But there’s got to be more to it than that.
It makes sense that we evolved to experience solving a problem this way, as in the real world it can mean the difference between life and death. Roeder traces a path between this addiction to problem-solving and the very invention of games. “We have to hunt to get our food, and we could approach this problem a number of ways,” he says. “We could hunt all the time, but this would be really dangerous. We could never hunt, but this would also be bad, because we wouldn’t get any good at it.
Sharing it with friends and family prompts delight but still occasional frustration. I get “age” as a starter word and play “overeagerness” . But the computer says no – or, rather, “not in wordlist”. Friends complain that “crushingly” is not allowed and point out that, rather sinisterly, you can have “waterboarding” but not “surfboarding”.
Enough of the nitty-gritty, though. If playing’s the thing, we need to get some people actually having fun with it. Of course, we’ve all been passing it around among people we know and practising in the office, but something more systematic is needed. Ana sets up a bit of market research via a site that records people’s responses as they play. We get sign-ups from the US, Canada and Britain; men and women; young and old.
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