![]() That sense of community is what word games foster especially well. Wordle has that characteristic.” Paul Bettner, co-creator of Words With Friends There’s the time limit, and if you can play it before you’re done, it’s a good game. Even crosswords, traditionally a personal challenge, are suddenly shared games: On apps, players can compete against each other to solve a given puzzle fastest people who want to improve their skills can watch other crossword solvers on the social gaming platform Twitch. What were once solitary pursuits, or discrete events experienced among a handful of people, have now become community sharing points. But as versions of those games migrated to smartphone apps, their social dimensions broadened dramatically. ![]() Crosswords have been a staple in newspapers since an initial craze in the 1900s Scrabble, whose layout was inspired by those early newspaper crosswords, is 84 years old. Word play, in analog form, has been around forever. The vast online universe of word-related games ranges from PuzzleJuice (a mashup of Tetris and a word search) to Letter Boxed (another Times game, in which the object is to use up all given letters to create words in the fewest turns) and Word Crush (Candy Crush, with letters). Wordscapes, an app-based puzzle game released in 2017, is routinely among the top-selling games for Apple and Android devices. Words With Friends, an app-based Scrabble knockoff, became a phenomenon in the early aughts. Wordle might be the most extreme example, but it’s part of an explosion of word games that have flourished on mobile devices, reaching new heights of popularity and cultural relevance. (photo by Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images) A woman plays Wordle on her smartphone, receiving an ‘Impressive’ result after just three guesses on April 21, 2022, in Birmingham, England. Celia Pearce, a professor of game design at Northeastern University, calls Wordle the “binge-streaming” of the game world in the manner of a beloved TV show, people are proudly obsessed with discussing it. There have been bootleg variations riffing on everything from geography to Taylor Swift lyrics, thinkpieces and memes dedicated to the phenomenon, even knitting patterns appropriating its yellow-and-green square design. The day’s puzzle trends frequently on Twitter, especially if the answer is difficult. People post their Wordle scores as routinely as they chat about weather my office has a Slack channel dedicated to it. According to a May earnings report, the game has been responsible for drawing “tens of millions” of new users to the Times in the months since. The game, which gives players six tries to solve for a five-letter word each day, quickly grew from 90 daily users to about 2 million before it was acquired by the Times in February 2022. That’s doubly true when it comes to Wordle, the guess-a-word game created by Brooklyn software developer Josh Wardle in 2021. Such online chatter is integral to the Spelling Bee experience. “I’ve been waiting! Also X sometime,” one requested. “So you’re building a buzz, is what you’re saying,” quipped another. The replies were a mix of faux outrage, trepidation, cheeky wordplay, and a palpable sense of “game on.” “No! Bad Sam! No!” tweeted one user. I play Spelling Bee most days, and I gasped “Oh, Lord” audibly when I read the tweet on a crowded commuter train. So compared with others, a z-centered puzzle would be - forgiveness, please - a doozy. As with Boggle or Bananagrams, the objective is to make as many words out of those letters as possible, always using the letter at the honeycomb’s center. The game, introduced in 2018 as a breezier, more accessible accompaniment to the Times crosswords, presents seven letters arranged in a honeycomb shape. “No no no … there couldn’t possibly be a Spelling Bee scheduled with a Z as the center letter … right?”Įzersky, 26, is the editor of Spelling Bee, the other popular, daily online word game hosted by the New York Times. On March 23, Sam Ezersky took to Twitter and posted an update that would strike terror in the hearts of his 22,000 followers.
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