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Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

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Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#71

Post by egypturnash »

alanbernstein wrote: post #14
egypturnash wrote: post #8

> It also brings players back into the game, but not in an annoying way like Farmville Facebook notifications. As someone who doesn't play, it's getting more and more annoying. Especially now that there's stuff like Wordle Except It's Four Games At Once demanding space on my social timelines.

Sounds like it's actually the social timelines that annoy you.

Well yes but that is a whole other rant. It’s been right under the threshold of “annoying enough to remember how to mute a phrase in Twitter’s web client” for a while.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#72

Post by DangitBobby »

egypturnash wrote: post #8

> It also brings players back into the game, but not in an annoying way like Farmville Facebook notifications. As someone who doesn't play, it's getting more and more annoying. Especially now that there's stuff like Wordle Except It's Four Games At Once demanding space on my social timelines.

We have a "game" channel in our friend discord channel (like 10 or so if us). All interesting content has been completely drowned out with wordle shares, and there's no end in sight. I'm glad people are having fun, but I would like that channel back.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#74

Post by NicoJuicy »

yen223 wrote: post #57
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making the whole thing client side also let him scale from a small handful of users to literally millions with basically zero additional work. I hope it inspires future devs to let go of feeling like they absolutely need to beg or require users to create accounts to capture email addresses just so they have a chance at monetizing their thing. Wordle may not have ever caught on if it were preemptively over-engineered:…

I wish I were smart enough to coin a catchy phrase that means "the moment some software dropped in quality, when they decided to add user accounts", because I see this quite a lot. I'm looking at you, Postman!

Oh yeah, and postman teams practically removed all your stored requests.

In the same space, i love how Telerik kept Fiddler Classic useable!

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#75

Post by micromacrofoot »

zanecodes wrote: post #53
moskie wrote: post #13

I've also begun to thing of Wordle as a meme. I know virtually anything could be framed as a meme, but there's specific aspects of Wordle and its rise in popularity that make it a particularly apt description. Its viral spread was fast and resonant. It's super easy to consume. Think pieces dissecting it end up in mainstream publications. The story about its origin gets mythologized. And, most importantly: unending ri…

Another cool instance of this was 2048, when it first came out. I was in college at the time, and for at least a month you could see a half dozen or more games of 2048 on the screens of any given classroom's laptops.

This was a good look back at 2048/Threes and all the clones

https://www.theverge.com/22914955/threes-2048-ketchapp-copyc...

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#76

Post by zgs »

Wordle is a spam engine. The game isn't that difficult -- it's been solved by several folks and it can always be won. The "share" button is the spam engine.

If you play to enjoy it and don't press "share", well done. If you press "share", be ready to burn in the level of hell reserved for spammers.

Fortunately, the NYT will screw this up and try to monetise it which will destroy its popularity in a short time.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#77

Post by bo1024 »

ghaff wrote: post #17

I actually think the OP and the comments are too focused on the programmer-related aspects of this. I'll add a few things. 1. It's not trivial but it's not that hard if you have a decent vocabulary and some intuitive sense for word frequencies (and word pair frequencies) for different locations in a word. The answer list does not seem to include really hard words as naively picking all the words in the MW dictionary…

#3 -- agree, the word list is also really nice. A bunch of plurals or conjugated verbs would really bring down the experience. But that would have been easy to overlook.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#78

Post by hombre_fatal »

dvirsky wrote: post #19

The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involv…

When I first discovered Wordle, I immediately looked for a way to keep playing with new random words, something that most clones have implemented.

After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab when I was stumped.

Had I invented Wordle, I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day which is surely one of the critical elements of its success.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#79

Post by chairmanwow1 »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #30
mcenedella wrote: post #7

The OP does a terrific job detailing the simple beauty of Wordle. Is it OK if we like it more because it was born out of love?: ‘Wordle is a love story’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-ga... And in the space of a month went from ‘introduced in NY Times’ to ‘bought by NY Times’? ‘The New York Times Buys Wordle’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/business/media/new-york-t... In many ways, I th…

Maybe this - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/25/summly-so...

Summly was an amazing thing

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#80

Post by Forricide »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #46

I'm surprised how infrequently I see anyone commenting on the wordle tile-flipping animation. It's... really nice? I like to watch it. I suspect I'm not alone, and if the tiles simply changed color in an instant without animation, wordle would not be as successful.

Josh Wardle, creator of Wordle, was interviewed on the Syntax podcast and they discussed exactly this. I'd paraphrase the segment (it was a really interesting bit on design philosophy) but I don't remember it quite well enough so I'd probably butcher it. But, suffice it to say the creator agrees.
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