I succumbed to Wordle. My previous podcast chat with games philosopher C Thi Nguyen has I reckon hit upon the pleasing mechanics of the game in this thread. See our podcast here on games philosophy. This is his thread on thinking about the game:

I’d like to expand on his point on the social diagram graph.

Once you have played the game a couple of times, and once you have finished a word. You can examine the struggle/journey of everyone else that day. There is only one a day, so you know everyone is playing the same word at the same time. One a day means you will not overcommit/addict like Candy Crush or Farmville might have done for you. (Other viral social games, though those games were tryingt to/were making money).

When you look at someone’s completion graph, you can know fairly accurately where they struggled, how they struggled or not. And either admire in awe at an amazing step change guess, or sympthasise on a tricky journey. 

As you know the word and the rules (or even if you don’t know the word, but can see the guesses) the design of the word gives you a replay into their game.

In this sense, it’s like watching the replay of a well constructed football goal in slow motion. You can see how the moves where put together and placed to an ending.

The social element recalls a time when people did many cultural activities together (and still do), like watching a new episode of Friends, or in the UK Bake Off and Strictly Dancing; or playing Among Us, Minecraft.* There is a large cultural shared language. Decades ago Brits listened to the wireless together, or Radio 4 was a very commonly shared cultural outlet. 

The partial atomisation of aspects of culture to where you can find your “tribe” means to some extent this sharing is different, maybe diminished. The typical Guardian reader, does not read the Daily Mail (and vice versa).

Strictly, Bake Off; to some extent Squid Game; Harry Potter and the like cross those boundaries.

Wordle achieves this cultural synchronicity as well. The achievement is daily and almost real time and crosses many boundaries.

So, in a rather amazing piece of social game picture design (the design of the final outcome was actually inspired by an early player, I believe), I say hats off to game maker, Mr Wardle.

I note the developer is feeling somewhat stressed about the responsibility of it all, and as of now, only unrelated games with similar names have benefited financially. This is a VC orientated interview and here in the Guardian.

*As an aside, noted Rationalist blogger, Scott Alexander got married recently, and one of his early dates was a building a house together in Minecraft with his now wife. Seems to represent something about the time we are living in.