Lots of people are addicted to the internet, despite not realizing it.
Every single day, a few times every hour, most people will have their senses glued to their phones. Through apps and through web browsers, and the many things people can do with their gadgets, the economy involves having them as users, and make money from their interactions and/or engagements.
Wordle is an online word game developed by Josh Wardle, and it takes a totally different approach.
Rather than making people to play the game as often as possible, Wordle can only be played once a day.
The concept and the gameplay of the Wordle aren't anything new. In fact, the rules are intuitive for those people who grew up playing word games such as Scrabble, or a code-breaking game such as Mastermind.
Wordle combined this familiarity with an opportunity to show mastery and to improve performance over time, a blend which enabled players to enter into a "flow state." Because of this, the game managed to catch the world's attention by storm.
Shortly after its debut, even Wardle the developer is overwhelmed with disbelief.
Once a day, the game will only provide a five-letter word that players should guess within six tries.
After each guess, the letters are either marked as green, if the letter and its position are connect; yellow, if the letter is correct but isn't in the right position; or gray, if the letter is not at all present in the word.
To make it more convenient, the game also mark the letters on the virtual keyboard with the same colors, in order to help players in their attempts.
But still, considering the humongous number of potential 5-letter words as answers, Wordle is brutal.
Yet, people seemed to love it.
People seemed to love the principle of the game, despite being a head-scratcher in reality.
And the main appeal of the game also sparked from the fact that the one new word per day, is the same for everyone.
With players playing the same game, trying to guess the same word, players can all compare how well they got on with it.
Wardle suggested that having only one puzzle per day creates a sense of scarcity, leaving players wanting more. And because the game encourages players to spend only a few minutes on the game each day, the game create that addiction of people urging for more..
The deceptively simple online word puzzle has had a meteoric rise since its launch in October 2021, up from a measly 90 daily players in November to 300,000 at the beginning of January 2022, to 2 million in the first weekend of the year.
The massive increase in players began when Wardle introduced a sharing feature to Wordle, allowing players to share their results to social media networks using a series of colored emoji grid.
While his creation's rapid success is giving excitement, the game's popularity is also giving him anxiety.
"It going viral doesn’t feel great to be honest. I feel a sense of responsibility for the players. I feel I really owe it to them to keep things running and make sure everything’s working correctly," said Wardle, the British software engineer based in Brooklyn, U.S..
Wardle initially developed the game so he and his partner Palak Shah can play.
The prototype of the game was originally created in 2013, but Wardle scrapped it at the time because his friends were unimpressed
At first and also until the game's rise to popularity, Wardle said that he has no intention to monetize it.
"It's not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs [...] It's just a game that's fun," he said.
Despite being the developer of the game himself, Wordle is made to have a random 5-letter word taken from the English dictionary, so he too can enjoy the game.
"Even though I play it every day, I still feel a sense of accomplishment when I do it: it makes me feel smart, and people like that."
But this phenomenon translates to many copycats.
Wordle as the viral sensation, was meant to be made only as a web app, meaning that it is only accessible via a browser. But with the game garnering hundreds of thousands of daily hits, a number of developers started cloning the game to create similar copies of the original Wordle by Wardle.
Some of the games, for example, revised Wardle's formula, by allowing users to change the word's length. Some even allow players to guess more than just one word per day.
Some are even subscription based, meaning that the rip-offs are earning money, while Wardle as the original creator, doesn't.
Because some of the clones also achieved popularity, some of the developers who piggybacked the original Wordle, began bragging about their products on social media, leading to some people to even ridicule Wardle.
Wardle suddenly became victim of his own creation, simply because the internet became addicted to his creation.
"I need to be really thoughtful. It’s not my full-time job and I don’t want it to become a source of stress and anxiety in my life," Wardle said.
"If I do make any changes, I would like to think they are changes I would have made even if it was just [my partner and I] playing."
Fortunately for Wardle, the internet responded with its own outrage. Soon after some developers started cloning Wordle, even Apple stepped in to ban some of them. This is because the worries over the clones were heightened because Wardle hasn’t tried to monetize the game.
Previously, Wardle, who frequently use 'powerlanguage' or 'powerlanguish' as his nicknames on the web, worked at Pinterest and Reddit before becoming a software engineer at Brooklyn art collective Mschf.
It's worth noting that Wardle's success managed to boost an app of the same time to the stratosphere. Steven Cravotta, a developer who created Wordle and abandoned it, suddenly saw that his product received half a million downloads because it shares its name with a viral sensation puzzle game.
Because of this, he has vowed to give the profits away.
Cravotta contacted Wardle, and decided to give away $3,000 to an organization that provides free tutoring and mentoring to children from disadvantaged areas of Oakland.
“At the end of the day, all of this happened because of Josh’s app, right? And I want to respect his mission," he said. "So you know, whatever the figure is, this isn’t really about the money for me. This is about doing something great for the world and, you know, I’m just happy to have this opportunity."
In the world where games become increasingly complex, there is always a market for simple games that managed to create a unique formula. Previously, a similar sensation was the Flappy Bird game.