Tech World: Wordle

This month’s topic isn’t an app or a gadget — but it’s a bona fide internet sensation. Wordle is a word game you play in your web browser. And it’s captured the hearts of people everywhere. The rules are simple: Guess the five-letter word of the day in six tries or less. Colored boxes tell you whether each letter is wrong, right in the wrong place, or right in the right place. A keyboard tells you which letters you’ve used. When you finish, you can share your results on social media as a block of colorful emoji boxes. For the uninitiated, these emojis are baffling, but to Wordle fans they tell a story: This player completed it in two — brilliant! That player had bad luck for four rows but pulled it together to win in the end — what a great effort! Why is Wordle so big? Many reasons. For one thing, it’s deliberately nonaddictive. There’s only one word each day, so you don’t spend hours trapped in the game. The writer, Josh Wardle — yes, he named Wordle after himself — made it for his girlfriend. Both are big fans of crosswords and word puzzles. Another key to Wordle’s success is that the words aren’t difficult. Wardle could have filled it with all 13,000 or so five-letter words in the English language. But his girlfriend didn’t want that. “She just wanted something she could sit down and mindlessly do,” Wardle told Slate.com. So she chose the 2,500 simplest words. Wardle’s girlfriend also had the final vote over the spelling. She’s American and he’s Welsh, so it’s “color” not “colour.” Finally, the game doesn’t nag you to play. Wardle didn’t plan to make money from it. It was a gift to his girlfriend. It caught fire. That’s good enough for him. (T) This article was provided by The Japan Times Alpha.