Defend The Indefensible: Wordle

Semantle is better

I like it because it's only once a day--it's impossible to develop the kind of addiction I have to internet Scrabble and internet backgammon. Half the time I forget to even check for that day's Wordle. I've done about 40--only got it in two once. I don't think I'd ever post on Facebook about it...though I do post Scrabble screenshots here and on Facebook.

It seems like the bulk of people came to Wordle very late in its run (the first time I remember seeing results shared en masse was somewhere in the 190s), so I have to imagine many of the most familiar words had already dropped off the list before people noticed it.

(xps & ledge has already got there first but)

I agree that this could happen (though have not paused to guess how many five letter words might be reasonably familiar to most people) but the 3rd and 4th Wordle answers were "sissy" and "humph"!

Can only imagine the reaction to those on Twitter now, "sissy" with a triple letter and a word I would not care to use in conversation unless very obviously joking, and "humph" right on the onomatopoeic word-or-not faultline (although I think it came up in Dordle or Quordle or Octordle recently).

(Yes I have been playing all 4 of these games lately; Wordle is a nice quick thing to do when you have a spare minute, and Quordle hits the a better sweet spot for actual puzzliness for me. Octordle is just too much, although possibly only because the UI is horrible and you can only see two of the words at once.)

Once I realized there was no skill involved, and heaps of luck

Half agree with this. One weird thing is that getting it in two (where's there's at least some reasoning involved) is more impressive than getting it in one (100% blind luck). I feel like I've used a lot of reasoning in the ones I've gotten in three and four.

I mean there’s the same amount of luck involved as other letter guessing games like wheel of fortune & hangman

xp yes, picking a second or third guess to eliminate as many alternatives as possible is definitely something you can do to improve on blind luck.

here's a few out of many non obscure words in the last 50 or so (apologies if anyone remembers this six years from now and complains about spoilers): hello, adult, rival, piece.

I'd say getting it in 2 is mostly just luck, though you can boost your chances a bit, and there can be a large amount of luck even with the 3s; if you're unlucky and/or don't pause to think through all the options you can lose, but most players will get there in less than 6 most days. So from the game design point of view Wordle is not perfect, but it's a fun enough pastime for a tea break, anyway.

And I admit when I see the green and yellow squares popping up I mostly think "nobody cares how many you got it in" (but yes, I've still talked about the day's puzzles online, so guilty too) but it's kind of nice to see the internet talking about something so harmless imo.

Working from home, I get to watch a TV quiz show called "Lingo".

This, basically, is the same as Wordle. Or so it seems.

I have not signed onto "Wordle" or anything similar, as the TV show is enough already.

(xp to self) Or, a month ago there were a lot of squares on my timeline and I'd think "nobody cares" but now there aren't so many, so when they do pop up it can be vaguely interesting to see if I can work backwards a bit to guess what word the poster started with.

(If I know them well enough to care at all what random words they typed into a webpage, which tbh is probably a stupid thing to think about at all.)

I just tried Semantle! God it is hard. I guessed the second-closest word on my 25th guess then spent my next twenty guesses on variations of that word instead of... something immediately adjacent to that word

Wordle is fine. I'm less interested in it now that it's on the Times website, and presumably will be paywalled soon. I still do them some days. It was fun when it was just a random web thing, sort of felt like a 90s internet throwback. I knew it wouldn't last that way.

I think its neat that it's a one-a-day thing and everyone gets the same word. the communal aspect of that is cool & I like that it only asks for a couple minutes of your day. watching Twitter bitch about a word like TACIT is kinda fun

Yeah, this. I don't post my own results on social media, but my wife and text them to each other every morning, and I'll occasionally chime in on someone else's Wordle post. I think it's a charming little game, with a charming little backstory, and it's charming that the dude got a million bucks from the NYT for something he made just for fun. Hard for me to see the harm.

my wife and I, that should say.

man alive otm

the original site's code was 100% client-side so you could just save the webpage to your computer and it would work offline for another 6 years until it runs out of words. i.e. it was made in a way thats impossible to paywall. the times basically just bought the name & idea.

My favorite thing was the pissy person on Twitter who scraped the word list from the code and made a bot that would post spoilers for tomorrow's word on everyone's results, I have never been irritated by something so much that it made me go out of my way to be an ass to people I don't know

i found the posts a little annoying at first, but now i don't care

I like it. It's like when people used to do the crossword on their commutes but now they do it before they start their day WFH

That person is a cunt but that was kinda funny, also the fact that they got banned within like a day - Twitter does have community standards! xp

yeah 100%

taylordle.com

Once I realized there was no skill involved, and heaps of luck, and few don't eventually guess the word

Getting the word is a given, the fun part is getting it in as few tries as possible imo.

I usually do it within a few moments of waking up, posting squares is lame though.

not skill but knowledge, the bigger your vocabulary the better obv

Wordle is mmorpg daily quests for boomers and the NYT ruling class. And that's okay.

I do wordle and quordle every night and have a running competition with my partner. It's become a midnight routine. Agree with a passing spacecadet that quordle is the copycat that feels like a real game and not a gimmick. Octordle is just ridiculous for the sake of it. And the quordle UI is good, they've gotten it so the whole playing board fits on your screen at once

I dislike the culture of secrecy-at-all-costs around wordle. People can get so weird about acknowledging any aspect of the word itself, even if it's like deep in someone's Twitter replies where no one would go if they hadn't already done the word that day. People will get weird when someone else types out yesterday's word. Can only assume this type of person is aroused by the inherent taboo of wordle

those are the same people that say "you telling me you enjoyed the show is a spoiler!!!"

run through wordle, quordle and octordle at midnight - it's not really rewarding at this point but it's like doing sudoku on my phone when I'm waiting around staring at the wall. Five minutes to run through all three, a miniscule serotonin hit at having won something.

I am obsessed with sedecordle now

If ever a word should have been solved in one try--I took five--it's "karma." Sorry, John Lennon.

It seems like the bulk of people came to Wordle very late in its run (the first time I remember seeing results shared en masse was somewhere in the 190s), so I have to imagine many of the most familiar words had already dropped off the list before people noticed it.

I thought the dude (and his partner) pared down the list to 2,500 or so familiar five-letter words, and then hit a randomizer that essentially set the word list for the next 6+ years. So there's no reason to think that earlier words were any more familiar than current or later ones.

Someone mentioned that upthread. I didn't know the backstory.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/does-wordle-prove-that-we-can-have-nice-things-on-the-internet

Wardle's background is interesting.

If Place sounds like a minimalist conceptual-art project, that may be because Wardle trained as a minimalist conceptual artist. He grew up in South Wales and moved to Oregon, in 2008, to get an M.F.A. in digital art. One of his few non-digital pieces, an installation in a physical gallery, was called “This Button.” People who entered the gallery saw a red button on a pedestal, and a timer showing how long it had been since the button had been pressed. “Imagine you walk in, alone, and the timer has been going for two days, and counting,” Wardle said recently. “You’re faced with a choice—you can have the momentary satisfaction of pressing the button, but you’ll be throwing that streak away, erasing all the restraint of however many strangers came before you. I found that to be an interesting tension.” His classmates didn’t. “They just walked up one by one, pressed the button, and went, ‘I don’t get it.’ ”

Place sounds like yourworldoftext. Speaking of which, does it (and its 77 page) still exist?

How common is it not to get the word in six attempts? Has anyone ever not managed to solve it?

My wife tipped me off to Heardle, which asks you to guess the song in as few tries as possible, with each attempt offering a little bit more of the track. The two I've done so far were different degrees of frustrating. The first stumped me a few tries in, until I guessed it was Marilyn Manson's "Beautiful People," which was wrong; it turned out to be Kanye's "Black Skinhead," which I had only heard once years ago but which bears a striking resemblance to the Manson song. The second one I eventually guessed correctly was Ariana Grande, but only after I got to her voice, plus the fact that I half remembered she had a hit that interpolated "My Favorite Things."

xp -- I've missed one in 65 played

thanks for the heads up, this looks very tantalizing - but you gotta promise: no more spoilers from now on!

xp to Josh re Heardle

Xp to getter - I've missed 2 out of 72 played. Generally get them in 3 or 4 though.

I’ve been playing it for a few months and missed the word once

The other day I got it on my first attempt- logically I understand this indicates nothing but luck, and getting it in two is far more impressive - but it was a real rush!

the only one I've missed is "VIVID"...I actually had to abandon it because I could not think of a single word that fit what I had left. the double letters are really tricky!

I think that's the one I missed.

I eventually got it, but it took me a long time to puzzle out.

I gave up on wordle about a while back, tried heardle for a few days but realised I was so out of touch with current music it was largely pointless, I tried a country one that was just guessing really...

So the only one I'm doing at the moment is worldle, which gives you the silhouette of a country and tells you how far away in distance you are from the right place. Without scale for context it can be quite tricky - the other day I just couldn't work out which Polynesian island it was in time.

My favorite thing was the pissy person on Twitter who scraped the word list from the code and made a bot that would post spoilers for tomorrow's word on everyone's results, I have never been irritated by something so much that it made me go out of my way to be an ass to people I don't know

― castanuts (DJP), Wednesday, March 2, 2022 11:05 AM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol this is geniusly evil

todays quordle was bullshit tbh

Seemed ok to me? Spoiler tag which one u don’t think is a word

i found today’s quordle tricky but not junto tricky

lost at wordle for the first time a couple weeks ago. casualty of hard mode where i had something like SPI_E on the third turn and it could have been SPITE or SPIKE or SPINE or SPICE but i didn't have enough rounds to check all 4 and was locked in. i've been reconsidering hard mode ever since, because ideally what you'd want to do in that situation is burn a move on like, TRICK which would narrow it down to something solvable within the 6 turns. but the fact that it's called "hard mode" keeps my ego from turning it off

i was pretty proud of my point histogram with modal score of 3 (just barely) in 100 games but i saw some smart people posting their histograms on twitter and was kind of shocked--one guy had median score of 3

I still do Framed and Wordle every day too - going it in a pals' WhatsApp group is what keeps the interest.

Also got World in one twice and have no expectation of ever doing that again, esp as I've mainly slipped back into a 'start with same word each day' routine (and that word has already come up)

Wordle, not World

I’m a big fan of Wordall: my main course after the Wordle starter.

Still do Wordle, Travle, Worldle and Connections. Wordall looks like a good one.

Nice twist to connections today

Yeah, enjoyed that although possibly a bit too easy?

our group started with fools as first word today ... looked like a terrible choice but was in fact very lucky choice

and connections was fun today as well

I am hating the Connections so much right now.

connections in part depends on learning how the author(s) construct the categories and also having cultural knowledge from growing up in the US. my wife didn't grow up in the US and gets super frustrated with some of the US-centric categories

not just US centric but often the double whammy of US sports *bleaurgh*

I'm USian and I have no idea what these emojis are supposed to be signifying! Ope wait a second okay I got there but it took me ALL the allowed errors.

I've been doing the Wordall every day - thanks Mike t-d!

they also sometimes seem to overlap with Wordle...?

Glad you’re enjoying Wordall; I’ve started tracking my average solution time, and I’ve managed to reduce it by three whole seconds this year! (Currently 2 mins 18 seconds)

not just US centric but often the double whammy of US sports *bleaurgh*

lol payback for everything I’ve needed to learn about cricket to understand a cryptic crossword.

It's only about once a week that I get thrown by a US-centric Connections category. Usually food or sport.