You can’t explain its success by product greatness only. I mean sure wordle is fine. But the no-ad and once-a-day features are what the new york times has been doing for years (and yes it works really well). There are probably _thousands_ of other mini games that are no-ad and once-a-day. The sharing part is pretty cool. It does encourage bragging and probably played a big role in its virality. But yet again, there m…
I think it's more than luck. Wordle was made by the same guy that created r/place and The Button so he clearly knows how to make viral things.
The wordlist definitely isn't perfect, and obviously each person has their own vocabulary, but it still is a key. It's something the creator mentions, if on your first play you run into a stupid word, you probably won't come back the next day. And the fact that the current word list is 1/th the total word count goes to show how many words are ridiculous. AFAIK his partner actually sifted through all 13k word list and…
That's interesting, I suspect a lot of Wordle's success derives from their curation of words to remove things like "abaft" and "imago". But then I see the NYT went and removed words like "caulk" and "agora" because they were "obscure", and I feel better about humph.
caulk was the word last week though? Nobody I play the game with knew that word. Granted we are not native english speakers. Too hard word every now and then is also unifying experience when everybody stops hating the player and instead hates the game.
Yup, totally right. Don't have much experience with Temple Run and its clones, but Flappy Bird fits the bill. The fact that there's only a couple games that come to mind reinforces the novelty of it happening again with Wordle though.
I got a high score of 165 on the original Flappy Bird (Samsung Note 3)
I'd mentioned how Wordle clones failed to copy its success because they didn't understand what made it unique before, the article does a decent job too: https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1481734261434507268
I don't think it's entirely true. Many have managed to create alternatives that have gotten serious traction. There's a few I've been consistently playing for a week and honestly enjoying more than Wordle itself. I've been playing Quordle, and sometimes it's more insane alternatives [1] [2]. I've also really been enjoying Semantle [3], it's probably one of my favorite and most unique ones. There's other ones that are…
Mastermind and alike have existed in many different forms over decades. None of them became as popular as Wordle, not even close. It's been mediocre and outdated for a long time. But, Wordle has features that makes it unique, welcoming, and viral. The alternatives you quote aren't even close. That doesn't mean none of them can catch up with Wordle. I was saying that most of them was getting it wrong (like removing daily word limits, making the game harder, more convoluted, asking for signup, adding ads, etc). Nope. That's not going to work.
I have been playing Quordle as well, and now find Wordle very slow and dull. I'll persist as long as my streak is active (60+ or whatever) but bail if it breaks. I play 10-20 games of Quordle a day and find it more interesting, challenging with IMO more difficult words, etc. But I can appreciate that one shared round was key to Wordle being noticed.
+1 quordle making wordle seem dull. But I only place the official once a day. I suck at it I think, but they do a great job of making it rewarding. Also their continuous improvement on the front end is a daily side game, to see what they changed today.
Yeah they added links to dictionary, which as a non native speaker, find great (I was already searching for words I didn't know, and now it's super convenient)
>One more factor in Wordle's popularity that I haven't yet seen commentators identify much. The game's word roster tilts heavily toward words with neutral or cheerful connotations. >So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words. Ironically, SLAVE was actually one of the future solution words i…
They removed it from the master dictionary as well.
That may have been accidental.
The array used to store valid guesses did not contain any of the words from the result array. Both are checked when you make a guess to determine whether it’s a valid guess. Removing a word from the result array also removes it as a valid guess unless it’s added to the other array.
I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt considering they also removed “inoffensive” words like “Agora” and say their removal as valid guesses was unintentional.
You can’t explain its success by product greatness only. I mean sure wordle is fine. But the no-ad and once-a-day features are what the new york times has been doing for years (and yes it works really well). There are probably _thousands_ of other mini games that are no-ad and once-a-day. The sharing part is pretty cool. It does encourage bragging and probably played a big role in its virality. But yet again, there m…
Thanks. It's hard to say this without feeling like you're taking away people's moment of being happy about a rare example when someone got lucky who we feel really deserved it. But I think you're quite right, we can't take it as proof that good things succeed or that bad things must fail. And it doesn't hurt to be gently reminded of that reality, especially in these moments.
You can’t explain its success by product greatness only. I mean sure wordle is fine. But the no-ad and once-a-day features are what the new york times has been doing for years (and yes it works really well). There are probably _thousands_ of other mini games that are no-ad and once-a-day. The sharing part is pretty cool. It does encourage bragging and probably played a big role in its virality. But yet again, there m…
I think it's more than luck. Wordle was made by the same guy that created r/place and The Button so he clearly knows how to make viral things.
Well, this also means that he already has a certain visibility, which definitely helps kickstart virality.