Wordle, schmordle

I wonder if everyone is still madly doing Wordle? After conducting a brief and highly unscientific survey of half a dozen people I would guess not as much as they were. We love novelty, but only while it’s still novel and then we get bored and move on. I think the man who invented Wordle sold it at just the right moment before the many imitators diluted the market and made its Unique Selling Proposition not quite so unique. What’s the opposite of a USP I wonder? Perhaps an SSP – a Superseded Selling Proposition.

There are so many choices of Wordle-type games now that the market is pretty much saturated. There’s Quordle, in which players have to guess four 5-letter words simultaneously and if that’s not enough, you can play Octordle, where you have to figure out eight 5-letter words. There’s Nerdle for maths fans, Worldle for geographers and Lewdle for giggling rude people. The joy of the worldwide web is that anyone with an internet connection can pile in and enjoy the latest craze and then those with creative minds and IT capabilities can take the original idea and tweak it for every possible taste. The problem with the worldwide web is that anyone with an internet connection can pile in and enjoy the latest craze, try all the tweaked versions and then quickly move on when the next big thing arrives. I’m not sure we have the staying power.

Wordle emerged last year when we were still intermittently confined to our homes, or at the very least confined to our own countries, when we wore masks indoors and lived with all sorts of restrictions that would have been unimaginable only 18 months before. We needed a distraction that we could share with our family and friends that didn’t involve leaving the house or Zoom. It was perfect, but will it last?

I remember when Sudoku was first introduced to Britain, rapidly established itself as a staple on the puzzle pages of many newspapers and remains just as popular today. Various spin-offs such as Jigsawdoku and Killer Sudoku followed, with their popularity seemingly undiminished. However, the Sudoku craze hit at a time before smartphones were widely available and we were less able to distract ourselves at a moment’s notice. I wonder if our 9-second attention span will allow Wordle and its variants to remain as giants in the puzzle world or if the whole thing will slowly fade away. Puzzles have always come and gone – how many people do Rubik’s Cube now?

As for me, I did get tired of Wordle and have now moved on to Globle, where you have to guess the mystery country of the day. I feel much happier staring at a map of the world than a 6-line grid. It just seems to have more scope for the imagination.