Photo by Pixabay
Almost a month ago, I saw the first colored squares pop up on my Twitter feed. I spent a day or two wondering what they meant before Googling the meaning, and then spent almost half an hour scouring the App Store for “Wordle.” It wasn’t until another couple days passed that I learned I wouldn’t find it there.
Wordle wasn’t an app or even a standard “.com” website. Donned with its original powerlanguage.co.uk domain, Wordle struck me as an echo of a bygone era. That era defined my early years on the internet, when so many websites were built through WordPress and Blogspot, utilized Flashplayer and appeared, in comparison to today’s websites, almost barren.
Wordle quickly became a part of my daily routine. Each night at the stroke of midnight, my partner and I would cuddle and quietly collaborate on the daily word puzzle. Rather than doing it apart and competing on our outcomes, we found it wholesome to collaborate with each other. During the day, I’d then compare our results to our roommate’s. Phrases like “that was a good guess,” “I wouldn’t have thought of that” and “nice job on getting that so fast” quickly became a series of kind words often uttered to each other in our household. As quickly as the puzzle had been solved, the topic would rest until the next day.
With Wordle, there has been no room for obsession, jealousy or gluttony. There has been a word a day, a spark of joy and a resumption to life.
A short while ago, I had a conversation with my roommate about how depression must have felt before the advent of antidepressants. I jokingly maintained that while it still would have felt absolutely horrible, maybe there was a redeeming factor that our ancestors didn’t know the full extent of on-demand instant gratification. I mean, what was the most exciting thing they could do — hoop rolling?
All jesting aside, I do firmly hold that entertainment has dramatically changed since the age of rolling a hoop along the ground for fun. Now, at the tip of our fingers, we have access to infinitely sparkly and bright apps and games for entertainment. Developers of these products maximize the joy beheld in them in order to maintain attention and as a result, profit.
Take for example the pings and animations coded into games like Candy Crush or Subway Surfers. The utilization of these forms of entertainment is instantaneously reinforced through overwhelming doses of the reward-associated chemical dopamine. For this reason, we spend immeasurable time glued to these games, giving the companies behind them billions of dollars annually in ad revenue and microtransactions.
However, prior to its acquisition by the New York Times, neither Josh Wardle (the creator of Wordle), nor Wordle as an entity, earned any revenue from the game. It hosted no advertisement space or opportunities for microtransactions. As a result, it remained in a bubble-free from the pressures of profiteering, resulting in a dependably simple game. Interestingly enough, despite its lackluster, people flocked to it — myself included.
The popular success of Wordle suggests that despite a cultural trend towards increasingly complex and exciting forms of entertainment, people still find value in the simple joys of life. Furthermore, the public concern over the New York Times’s acquisition of the game highlights a growing resistance towards the corporate monopolization of happiness. Earlier this year, Meta announced that Facebook lost gross daily users for the first time in its history. Despite the social connections and entertainment that led users to create accounts, concerns over increasing ad space on the app as well as leaks of users’ private data made over 500,000 users jump ship in the last quarter of 2021. More casual examples of this resistance include early-pandemic activities like sourdough making and dalgona coffee. Despite their simplicity, these activities brought together friends, families and communities both in-person and online. Though the trends gained virality through Tik Tok, the joy found in them lay outside of the user’s relationship to the app; it was possible for a loaf of sourdough to just be a loaf of sourdough and not a blank check for Tik Tok to profit off of.
Don’t get me wrong, I can acknowledge that Wordle is far more advanced than hoop rolling. I, however, do believe there is a certain shared simplicity in the two games. Given that Wordle is the closest I have gotten to simple, analog joy in a long time, I might have to rethink my stance on how happy people in the past were. At the end of the day, they might have only had hoop rolling — but at least that wasn’t acquired by the New York Times.