It's nice how things get "pretty damn smart" if you don't optimize for trackable eyeballs on ads.
Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
171–180 of 271 posts
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#172Yet another flappy bird kind of a thing that caught on. It seems pretty boring to me and I don't wonder at all why I didn't have this idea first.
It's pretty much a crossword variation.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#173I may be completely wrong but, after playing 3 or 4 times, I got the feeling that this game is very easy and involves more luck than skill or strategy. It looks and feels like a puzzle so you get the feeling of having solved something but have you, really? If you find the word in 3 tries 90% of the time, does it mean you're actually better at the game than someone who usually needs 4 or 5 attempts? Or are you just a…
I'd say it's 50% luck and 50% strategy. I have written my own clone, and my colleagues play it everyday and share their result. I can tell that some people are consistently _really_ good at it and never lost a single game, while some are average at best.
Of course, if you pick the right word in 3 tries or less, it's mostly luck. But beyond that, you have to plan a little bit ahead, recognize there are more possibilities than available lines, and act accordingly. That's when the game becomes interesting, and gives a little bit of dopamine. Finding the word in <= 3 tries is nice if you want to brag a bit, but not really satisfying. It's when you finally find it at your 5th or 6th try that it's pleasing.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#174Yet another flappy bird kind of a thing that caught on. It seems pretty boring to me and I don't wonder at all why I didn't have this idea first. It's pretty much a crossword variation.
Salty is a five letter word.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#175I 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…
#1 is why it's so successful. It's just challenging enough to make you think, but still solvable by most people. So we all get that nice dopamine rush of solving a puzzle with a reasonable perceived effort. How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words? There is a very devoted fan base for crossword, but it's not as universal as Wordl's adoption. To me, that's the genius…
Whilst solvable, there's still a skill differential in the scoreboard. So in group-chats, everyone "solves" it, but the person who does it in 2 gets to celebrate (but a chunk of it is luck so it rotates a bit).
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#176My friends and I love Wordle. I made a Discord bot that picks a random French word every day at 8 AM and 8 PM, and we guess it in the chat. I added a rule so that you can't make two guesses in a row, in other words players must take turns making guesses, so one person cannot just brute force the game immediately. We don't limit ourselves to 5 letter words, and it's really fun when the word is very long. Sometimes it…
For you words list, you can look here: http://www.3zsoftware.com/fr/listes.php
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Or he just has a knack for creating viral things.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#178It's also interesting in how modest and personal it is. There are no global scoreboards, so there's no "anonymous competitiveness." Nobody cares about your scores except your personal relationships, which allows it to not care about exploits.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#179The 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…
> 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.
It's probably the same with Twitter's char limit.