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What Makes Wordle So Satisfying to Play?
Unlike the crossword or other word games, Wordle is about eliminating possibilities
In what I guess you’d have to call a predictable turn of events, Wordle — the free online game that asks you to guess a 5-letter word by process of elimination — has been sold to The New York Times just a couple of months after it launched. Which makes this a good occasion to think about why Wordle has become so enormously popular (at least among very online people) so quickly.
What makes the question interesting is that Wordle is not like a crossword puzzle or its predecessor in buzziness, the Times’ Spelling Bee. Those are word games where the challenge, and the enjoyment, is in what you know (in the case of a crossword) or what you see (in the case of Spelling Bee). They’re games you solve mostly by filling in gaps., where the goal is to make yourself see what the word (or words) you’re missing is.
Wordle, though, is the opposite. It’s about eliminating possibilities, about recognizing what the word you’re looking for is not. It’s like the embodiment of Sherlock Holmes’ famous line: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” To be sure, the words in Wordle are rarely improbable, which is one of the things that…
