I love the story behind it - how the developer created it for his partner, who loves word games. How it went from being this uber niche game with a couple of dozen players in November to now having more than two million users worldwide. How it gave us all something else to focus on that isn't Covid-19, geopolitical tensions, the housing crisis or the climate emergency.
I love that you can only guess one word a day and it's not up to you when you start a new game. In a world of same-day deliveries where we no longer simply consume but rather "binge" everything, the slow pace of the game feels radical.
It is also incredibly simple. You don't have to sign up to anything in order to play. No one is levelling-up, there's no need to self-optimise and no way to jump through hoops to get ahead of anybody. The day begins, we all get the same word to guess and the same number of attempts at guessing it. The next day, we rinse and repeat.
But perhaps my favourite thing about Wordle is the social contract that exists among those who play the game and share their results online. People will post the little grey, yellow and red squares and the number of attempts it took them to guess the day's word but they will not reveal the answer. Wordle players refuse to spoil the fun for anyone else, no matter how much time is left in the day to complete the puzzle.
Seeing other people sharing their Wordle results is the level of community interaction I need right now. I feel bonded to these people by a shared interest, the funny memes that come from it and the low-stakes competition in our shared results, but we don't have to talk about it any more if we don't want to. In this community, you adjust the dial of how much you want to take part in. The only rule is that you don't spoil it for others by giving away the actual word.
Seeing people quietly upholding this unspoken social contract is a small reminder that we all do respect each other and no one (okay fine, not many of us) are out there looking to spoil the fun for others.
Wordle is proof that you can find wholesome communities online, sharing things just for the fun of it. And, at a time when so many of us around the world are isolated, we need that more than ever.
