What can Wordle’s success teach game developers?

The first time I saw that grid of grey, yellow and green blocks on my Twitter timeline, I just kept scrolling. But within a matter of days they were too ubiquitous to ignore, piling up on my screen like a huge game of Tetris. Google led me to the source, a simple word game which has improbably become the first must-play of the year. I discovered Wordle, and I fell for it.

For the uninitiated, Wordle is a browser-based game that gives players six chances to guess a five-letter word. After each guess, the letter tiles turn a different colour, indicating whether they’re present in the answer and if they’re in the right position. When it launched in October, Wordle had 5,000 players per month. By the end of January, there were more than 45mn and the game had been adapted into languages ranging from Esperanto to Tamil. Last week The New York Times bought the game for “an undisclosed price in the low seven figures”, adding it to their stable of games alongside the popular Spelling Bee.

Wordle may not appear to have much in common with Grand Theft Auto, but it draws from and subverts several key principles of game design. What can developers learn from its titanic success?

The game was originally created by software engineer Josh Wardle as a way to entertain his partner, but soon became so popular among his family that he decided to release it publicly. He cannily chose to make it playable only once a day, with all players guessing the same word. This created an opportunity for shared digital experience, which is increasingly rare in our times of desynchronised entertainment through diverse streaming platforms.

A single design choice took the game viral. After noticing a group of players in New Zealand sharing their results online using coloured emoji squares, Wardle wrote code in December allowing players to copy their daily results on to Twitter. The resulting graphical maps are a deceptively smart invention: they make the game immensely shareable, each readable as a miniature story with its own emotional arc. When I see a row of incorrect grey letters followed immediately by a correct answer, I feel the swooping uplift of that player’s luck. Conversely, seeing a player guess four letters correctly every time but never uncovering the fifth is a classic tale of frustrated ambition — the almost of it all.

Wordle’s lack of originality is a strength, rather than a weakness

The website’s design is minimalist, with no interfering pop-ups and only the subtlest flourishes of animation when the letters rotate to reveal your results — the audiovisual fireworks of Candy Crush dimmed to a Valium Zen. This allows the player to focus on the gameplay, which echoes games such as Jotto, Mastermind or the TV game show Lingo.

Wordle’s lack of originality is a strength, rather than a weakness — the learning curve is almost non-existent, allowing it to embed itself frictionlessly as a daily ritual. This focus on accessibility is echoed in the lexicon. Anyone who has played Scrabble with a human dictionary knows how demoralising it can be, but Wordle is free of such elitism, dealing only in common terms. Out of the 12,000 possible five-letter words in English, the game uses only the 2,315 most recognisable, selected by Wardle’s partner.

Wardle previously worked at Reddit, where he created two social experiments that number among the discussion website’s finest hours: The Place, which asked users to take part in a huge collaborative artwork, pixel by pixel, and The Button, in which a 60-second timer counted down, resetting any time a visitor clicked (it lasted two months before reaching zero). Wardle’s curiosity about internet crowd psychology and his understanding of what tech platforms demand from users informed his creation of Wordle.

While most tech products try to capture as much of the user’s time and attention as possible, Wordle does the opposite. Nothing is monetised. Wardle has designed the game so players can spend no more than a few minutes daily on his site. The shareable emoji grids don’t even include a link for promotion. It runs counter to the wearisome trends towards addictive and ethically dubious monetisation strategies in tech. Wordle succeeds because it genuinely respects its players.

If it sticks with the current word list, Wordle will run out of new daily challenges in less than seven years. I suspect the hype will die down long before then — the game’s brevity suits the short attention spans of internet users, but people will become bored by the lack of variation. It will live on as a dose of comfort and distraction somewhere on the New York Times website, a memory of a time when our brains longed for relief from pandemic boredom. Yet in an age when everything that goes viral seems in some way crass, polarising or financially parasitic, Wordle has the noble legacy of something created with a purity of heart that existed only to delight.