A programmer’s Wordle game went viral – and along came the copycats

Five letters, six attempts, and just one puzzle to solve per day: the “Wordle” formula couldn’t be simpler, but in a matter of weeks the online brain teaser has got millions guessing around the world. “It just grabs you,” daily player Susan Drubin, 65, said of the code-breaking word challenge – perhaps best described as a cross between the retro board game Mastermind and a daily crossword. The puzzle’s rise has been meteoric: according to The New York Times, 90 people played on November 1. Two months later, on January 2, more than 300,000 tackled the challenge. The Guardian put the daily player count last weekend at 2 million, and rising. Its designer, former Reddit software engineer Josh Wardle, has decided not to monetise the game. But it did not take long for enterprising copycats to come up with clones to sell. This guy shamelessly cloned Wordle (name and all) as an F2P iOS game with in-app purchases and is bragging about how well it's doing and how he'll get away with it because Josh Wardle didn't trademark it. So gross. pic.twitter.com/kIs8BypuRA — Andy Baio (@waxpancake) January 11, 2022 Apple said on Wednesday it has removed several Wordle knock-offs from its App Store Wardle’s once-a-day online word game does not have a mobile app and can be played on only his website, which is free of ads or pop-ups. But some developers have created identical app versions to cash in on surging demand for the game, with unsuspecting users driving up downloads. As of Wednesday, the only remaining product on the App Store with that title was Wordle!, a time-based game created by Steven Cravotta more than four years ago. Cravotta, 24, says he initially “had no idea what was going on” when his app starting logging more than 40,000 daily downloads. “I didn’t know it was a craze,” Cravotta told The Wall Street Journal. Among Us clone now the most downloaded game on China’s App Store The rules of Wardle’s game are disarmingly simple: find the word of the day in six tries or fewer. Each guess must be a valid five letter word: letters in the correct space turn green, while letters that are part of the answer but in the wrong spot turn yellow. Only one word is offered up per day, and it is the same for everyone. Can’t crack today’s puzzle? You’ll just have to wait until tomorrow for the next one. Players can generate a shareable widget, with six lines of coloured squares indicating how many tries it took to solve the riddle – without giving away the day’s answer, of course. After a couple of weeks, Drubin – like legions of players – took to sharing her results on social media under the hashtag #Wordle. And thus, a viral phenomenon was born. but what if i cross stitch every single one of my wordle results pic.twitter.com/g312E8WrCC — abcdefghijklmnopqrs_uvwxyz 🪡🏛 (@traceyfanclub) January 8, 2022 “I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun,” Wardle told The New York Times on Monday. “It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs.” For Mikael Jakobsson, a research coordinator for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Game Lab, Wordle falls into the “gap-filler” category, a game “that you can pull out when you’re waiting for a friend or … for the bus”. He puts its success partly down to how easy it is to share results with friends, either by social media or word of mouth. Rachel Kowert, a psychologist specialising in video games, also points to the social comparison theory, which holds that everyone wants to evaluate themselves in relation to others. Just click it: why Hong Kong is No 1 in the Popcat online gaming craze The temptation is such that tongue-in-cheek debates have sprung up online about muting friends who tweet out their “humble-brag” scores. Another key part of the game’s allure, Kowert noted, is that being “limited to one a day gives you a sense of psychological scarcity”. “You’re not overdoing it in any one session, and it keeps you wanting to come back to continue to play day after day,” she said. Wordle is already being adapted into other languages, including French, having swiftly conquered the English-speaking world – although, spoiler alert, the Wednesday word’s American spelling triggered howls of online player protests from its creator’s fellow Britons. Wardle is based in New York but is originally from Wales. Additional reporting by Reuters