What’s a five-letter word for ‘popular’?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/01/2022 (1543 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After the new year, my Twitter feed was awash in cryptic, Tetris-like arrangements of green, yellow and grey squares accompanied by a score out of six and a “Wordle” number.

I assumed it was some kind of phone game, which I’m wary of; I already spend too much time gazing into black mirrors that are ruining both my posture and eyesight. But I also hate not knowing what people are talking about, so here we are.

Wordle is a daily online word puzzle that has gone viral. Here’s how it works: you get six guesses to figure out the five-letter word du jour, which is different each day. If a tile turn green, the letter is both in the word and in the correct position. A yellow tile means the letter is in the word but in the wrong position, and a grey tile means the letter is not in the word at all.

The first go is a bit of a sweet, horrible freedom situation because you can guess any five-letter word. (I also took the explanation too literally and thought we were only making words starting with the letter W, as that was the letter in the green position in the example, so imagine my surprise when the word of the day was “tiger.”)

That’s it. That’s the game. And it’s very good.

It’s not hard to understand why this little game has gone viral, especially in this Omicron-fuelled January. Wordle is attractive in its simplicity. There’s no app to download; you access it via a bare-bones website. There are no annoying ads, no aggressive, siren-red push notifications. It doesn’t clamour for your attention. Wordle doesn’t care whether you play it or not. Wordle just is.

The back story is also extremely cute: per a feature in the New York Times, the game’s creator, a software engineer named Josh Wardle, made it for his partner, originally just for her (aw). Now, it has hundreds of thousands of players.

Wordle taps into a few sincere pleasures. One, it’s a little morning ritual now, something I do when I have my first coffee. It wakes up my brain: when first confronted the blank squares, every five-letter word I know seems to disappear from my mind. It is something (admittedly very tiny) to look forward to, which counts for a lot in these increasingly precedented times.

Two, there’s a social element: you can share how well you did for both camaraderie and extremely low-stakes competition — and you can do so without spoiling the puzzle for anyone else.

But by far and away, the single best thing about Wordle is that it cannot be binged.

Wordle cannot be mainlined like a hot new series that arrives in its entirety to a streaming platform, or like most gaming apps that seemingly have no end.

Because I know myself, I limit myself to having exactly one game on my phone, and I am not allowed to spend real-life money on it. It’s called Two Dots, a very cute and soothing puzzle game I was Instagram-influenced into downloading. I am on level 658. I lose hours — hours — to this thing. If I’ve been at it too long, I see dots when I close my eyes.

You cannot lose hours to Wordle. You play it, it’s over. It requires three to eight minutes of your concentration. You can’t repeat a frustrating level; if you fail, you fail, and that’s just how it is. Better luck tomorrow.

A diversion to be savoured feels novel in an on-demand, instant-gratification culture that, by design, makes you want more. I’ve appreciated, too, how many streaming shows are returning to a weekly release schedule à la cable; you have to wait. Anticipate.

I’m not one for resolutions, but a goal I’ve set for myself is to consume things — whether its food or books or TV shows — more mindfully, to maximize the pleasure I’m getting out of them and prolong the experience, whatever the experience is.

And hey: “enjoy” is a good five-letter word.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @JenZoratti