If you pay attention to social networks, you should be familiar with the kind of tweets that have appeared intensively recently: the main content is only yellow, green, and gray emoji squares, accompanied by a few words of excitement or annoyance.
Don’t worry, it’s not some cult code or some alien script. This is just the ‘daily record’ of Wordle, a web game.
Many readers may be a little familiar with this interface – it looks like Crossword, yes, from a classification point of view, Wordle and crosswords are a type of word puzzle game. In English-speaking countries, word puzzles have a long history and wide audience, and there are many changes, and crosswords are the most representative of them.
In contrast, Wordle seems to be greatly simplified in difficulty and form: the game is updated daily, and the player’s only goal is to guess a five-letter word within six attempts.
For this, the game interface is a 5×6 array of squares. After the player enters the guessing result through the keyboard below, the game will color the letter square to indicate the accuracy of the guess.
Although Wordle has simple rules, it comes with many attributes that promote communication.
First of all, Wordle only updates one topic a day, and this artificial scarcity enhances players’ desire for challenge and expectation. Secondly, Wordle’s sharing function is cleverly designed. Using emoji color blocks to refer to game results is not only highly recognizable, but also easy to spread, and avoid spoilers. In addition, the traditional popularity of word puzzle games in European and American countries and the simple and easy-to-use game design have contributed to the popularity of Wordle to a certain extent.
Wordle is also a game with a story. Game author Josh Wardle is a software engineer living in Brooklyn, New York, and his partner Palak Shah loves crossword puzzles. To let her kill time during the epidemic, Wardle developed this game, and Wordle is a homonym of the theme of the game combining her surname and the word.
Originally, the game was just for fun in a two-person world. In October last year, Wardle sent the game to a family group chat on WhatsApp, causing an obsession with relatives, which made Wardle feel the game’s potential to spread and posted it on the Internet in October. As of early January, 2 million players are challenging Wordle every day.
However, Wardle doesn’t seem to have any plans to monetize Wordle’s traffic and popularity.
Wordle is still just a web game, with no client, no fees, and no ads. In an interview, Wordle said he wasn’t interested in any of this, saying he ‘doesn’t want players to spend more than three minutes a day’.
After Wordle became popular, imitations popped up in the app store, some charged as much as $30 for subscription fees, and one developer was still bragging about ‘success’ online. Fortunately, this behavior attracted Apple’s attention after it was exposed, and most imitations have since been removed from the shelves.
For most people, Wordle is a time-killing puzzle game. But just like other anagram games, to get on the road of high play, it is not enough to just hit the big luck, but also needs a certain English vocabulary reserve and vocabulary knowledge. It’s hard to ignore the game’s potential for entertaining and helping students build vocabulary.
Although Wordle’s design is already beautiful, we still have to judge it.
Wordle’s aesthetics depend heavily on the font it chooses.
Words with the same weight may appear longer with greater weight because they occupy a larger area.
Color doesn’t mean much. But now this seems to be an advantage, allowing it to be combined with different images.
