Wordle: Cannot Brain.

Richard Bradbury: Unless you’ve been ignoring the Internet – in which case it’s probably strange that you’re listening to this show - you will probably have noticed a flood of green, yellow and grey tiles washing over your social feeds. The word game Wordle has gone from living room project to global sensation seemingly overnight.

Richard Bradbury: As someone who’s better acquainted with 4-letter words, you might not be the best person to ask. What is Wordle doing to us?

Matt Armitage:

• That seemingly simply question I hope has a bunch of answers I can string out in to 20 minutes.

• Otherwise, I’ll have to speak very slowly for the second half of the show.

• Actually, it’s a whole bunch questions.

• How and why has Wordle become so popular?

• What are its cultural impacts?

• And, crucially, what, if anything is it doing to our brains?

Richard Bradbury: Do you want to recap what it is?

Matt Armitage:

• Sure. That’s good for 2 minutes.

• Makes me more certain we’ll at least make it to the break.

• We covered the game briefly on one of the weird science episodes a couple of weeks ago.

• Wordle is a grid based puzzle game. Half scrabble, half boggle.

• You have six attempts to guess the correct word.

• Wrong letters in your attempt appear against a grey background.

• If you’ve got the right letter but the wrong place, the tile background turns yellow.

• And if the letter is in the right place, it turns green.

• It’s very simple and the learning curve is pretty fast.

• And it’s easy to share your results.

• I know you’ve been playing – how are you enjoying it?

Richard Bradbury: [replies]

Matt Armitage:

• A little bit of background. NY based programmer Josh Wardle came up with the game as a stress-breaker for himself and his wife.

• He released it in October as a web-based game. Which is unusual in this everything is an app world.

• You log onto the URL and there it is.

• There’s one puzzle a day. The word is the same for everyone, so you’re competing against the community of players.

• Or just solving it for your own satisfaction.

• Wardle noticed that early users were using emojis to share their results on SM.

• So he came up with that simple and now iconic sharing matrix that is all over Twitter and FB.

• And that’s when it exploded back in December.

• It quickly ramped from dozens to hundreds to millions of users.

Richard Bradbury: And Wardle has since sold the rights to the game to the New York Times?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes, so Wardle sold it for what is believed to be at least USD1m.

• There’s been a bit of blowback - because people realized that the New York Times will probably paywall it at some point.

• They already have a suite of subscription-based crossword and word games which is massively popular.

• I think people expected it to remain commercial free.

• The Internet rounded very strongly on an enterprising app developer who sold a subscription-based clone

• He was forced to apologize, remove it and refund everyone.

• I’m not really bothered about the sale – as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I was worried that it might disappear under the weight of its own success.

• With Wardle unable or unwilling to maintain it.

Richard Bradbury: What about the New York Times’ claim that they will maintain it free for the time being?

Matt Armitage:

• Just that – it’s free for now. I imagine the company will eventually use it as a lure for their other games.

• They may even paywall it completely. Let’s say there are 3m users. You convert just 10% of them into paying US$5 a month.

• That’s $1.5m a year. The transition to NYT ownership hasn’t been entirely smooth.

• However, some users complained that their streak scores were lost in the transition to the NYT’s servers.

• There was an avocado toast of complaints. I mean an avalanche of complaints, following that.

• And this week I had a game repeat on me and give the stats for the next day’s game which was confusing.

• Otherwise it’s very much first world problems as usual.

• In any case, even if the NYT does close it off, there are so many other variations around that…

• … you will still be able to get your wordle fix in the flavour of your choice.

Richard Bradbury: How many clones are there now?

Matt Armitage:

• I can’t even count. There are dozens.

• I think I mentioned on the previous show – there’s a Bahasa version called katapat which a lot of my friends seem to be enjoying.

• I’ve pared it back to 3 that I play regularly.

• Wordle. Wordle 2 – which is a six-letter word version and releases a new game every 12 hours rather than every 24.

• And Absurdle – which uses a neural net.

• With Wordle – the word is set before you start.

• With Absurdle it changes each time you guess, to make it harder for you to win.

• Fortunately, you get as many attempts as you need and you can play as often as you like.

• You’re probably training someone’s AI system to become more ruthless, or spell better.

Richard Bradbury: Are you any good?

Matt Armitage:

• I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone is any good.

• Certainly people with some linguistic and / or certain mathematical approaches like information theory might have an advantage.

• I’ve kind of stayed away from the tips and tricks too much.

• Some people suggest using the same word to start each time, for example, and evaluate the best starter word.

• A programmer and code designer called Tyler Glaiel says the best word to start with is an old version of the word rote, spelled ROATE.

• I’ve tried it and it doesn’t seem to make any difference.

• But I like not knowing the cheats and hacks. We may drop a few more today if there’s time.

• I want it to be a test of my ability to solve it from whatever starting point.

• But back to your question - There’s a small group of us who play together.

• The antisocial social club – me, Ashwin and GinMay.

• And I am by far the worst player in the group.

Richard Bradbury: Well done, we’re getting closer to the break…

Matt Armitage:

• Told you I could do it.

• I was introduced to a new version this week, quordle.

• It challenges you to solve 4 grids simultaneously, this time in 9 guesses.

• Which I shared with my antisocial clubbers and they were instantly better than me.

• With quordle, the same guess shows on each grid until the word is correctly guessed.

• Which requires a totally different approach as you have to move between the four game boards.

• And to return to your comment about not being near the break – it’s these different games that got me thinking about what Wordle is doing to us.

• Because it’s not as though the variations are harder than each other.

• But they do require very different approaches and techniques.

• And to begin with, it can feel really difficult to move from one game to another, until you develop that technique.

Richard Bradbury: In terms of the technique?

Matt Armitage:

• I’m sure you’ve experienced it yourself.

• Just in my own experience, when I play Absurdle,

• I’m anticipating the moves the AI will make as much as I am trying to solve the word.

• I’m using my guesses to box the AI into a corner and narrow its choices.

• Compare that to Quordle.

• With Quordle you’re using guesses on different boards to provide clues for other words.

• So, if you do it properly – which I don’t seem to be doing –

• Even moving from Wordle to Wordle 2, that shift from five to six letters makes you approach the game differently.

• To internalize a different set of conditions.

Richard Bradbury: Do you think you could be overthinking a little puzzle?

Matt Armitage:

• I overthink pretty much everything. But to that point.

• In an interview with Salon magazine, Wardle claimed that he wanted to create a game that was mindless.

• And I think I get what he means. It’s something that you can lose yourself in for that moment.

• It’s not mindless in the sense of creating no mental effort.

• That’s what reality TV and crisps were created for.

• It’s mindless in the sense that once you know the rules you sink into it without effort.

• So I started thinking about the games in terms of the neuroscience and the psychology.

• And wow – Google is full of stuff - there are a lot of scientists looking at the phenomenon, or at least, in associated areas.

Richard Bradbury: What is it that makes it so addictive?

Matt Armitage:

• Genuinely, that’s the question, isn’t it?

• Tracking it is watching a trend emerge in real time.

• So it’s great for social scientists, as well as people like me who have no recognized of useful qualifications.

• For starters, that word addictive:

• Yes, playing it gives you a small dopamine rush.

• But it isn’t like the game apps that have been accused of using flashing lights and sounds to create these continual dopamine rushes that keep you playing, buying coins and coming back.

• It’s free. It’s simple. There are no game tokens or coins to buy.

• You figure it out and move on with your day.

• But the barrier to entry is very low. It’s a website – you can get there from any browser.

• There’s nothing to download. There are no ads. No flashing icons.

• Just a grid and a qwerty keyboard.

• It’s a bit like when you switch your word processor or some other app into distraction free mode.

• It’s just you and the game.

Richard Bradbury: Well we made it. After the break we look more at our brains on games. And maybe make you into a better Wordle player than Matt.

BREAK

Richard Bradbury: Before the break we were starting to explore the cultural and scientific impacts of Wordle and its imitators. Matt, you mentioned that there is a very low barrier to entry for the puzzle. How important is that?

Matt Armitage:

• From what I can glean from the psychologists that have weighed in on this,

• It’s fairly important.

• The fact that you don’t download anything. That it’s just a browser.

• Coupled with that one game a day frequency. It’s something you can head over to take a break from work.

• A few people have mentioned they play it during long and unfulfilling meetings.

• But also because if you get stuck you can go back to what you were doing befoe and come back to it.

• It just sits in a tab next to your email or whatever docs you’ve got open.

Richard Bradbury: And this is helping to create that sense of a cultural moment around the game?

Matt Armitage:

• Going back to what I said earlier, the game really took off when Wardle added that iconic sharing mechanism.

• I’ve seen various reports that this has helped to create a kind of FOMO sensation around the game.

• People see the game icons displayed on people’s feeds and wonder what the heck is going on.

• I’ve experienced it myself. People asking what they mean – you explain the game to them.

• In other cases it’s people discussing strategies, starting words, that type of thing.

Richard Bradbury: So, it’s like a water cooler moment?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes. And this is where the pandemic comes in.

• I think it was a piece on Vox I was reading – “Wordle is a deceptively easy game for burnt-out pandemic shut-ins” by Aja Romano

• The piece also points out that water cooler moments have become fewer and further between over the past few years.

• We still have sports and politics. But our tastes and consumption have fragmented – what you and a colleague see on social media is probably very different.

• Sure, we may share memes and videos – but we aren’t discussing them as shared experiences in the way that the Superbowl would be in the US.

• And with the rise of streaming shows, we weren’t watching things at the same time or with the same frequency.

• We have to tiptoe around the idea of spoilers for people who haven’t seen the show yet.

• And the Vox piece also points out that discovering new or unknown shows –

• I think it uses the example of yellowjackets, which picked up fans slowly until it went mainstream.

• Can create cliques – those in the know and those outside – which is the opposite of the watercooler moment.

Richard Bradbury: And presumably the pandemic has disrupted that still further?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes, because we are either not in the office, or we’re in the office less, and often, we’re on a rotation with a smaller pool of colleagues.

• So we don’t have that same opportunity.

• Vox also mentions the re-emergence of episodic media – more and more shows on streaming platforms are being released weekly or in chunks.

• Against that backdrop. Wordle has created a moment we can all share.

• The simplicity of the game and that low barrier to entry means that you have a very diverse playing group.

• It transcends a lot of age and social barriers.

• You can share your results – without giving any of the results or your guesses away.

• And those scores provide that FOMO component.

• It creates highs and lows: You can be brilliant at it one day and fail completely the next.

• And people tend to be as supportive of the of the failures as they are of the successes.

• Because they’re experiencing those same fluctuations themselves.

Richard Bradbury: So, it’s essentially a rare shared experience in a time of greater social isolation?

Matt Armitage:

• That’s what it seems to be. It brings people together for that brief moment every day.

• There was the news story that came out last week, I think.

• A woman was taken hostage and locked in her basement by a mentally ill man in Illinois.

• Her daughter in California became alarmed when her mother didn’t text her wordle scores and then didn’t answer the phone.

• After a neighbour reported that no one was answering the door but the car was there,

• the woman’s daughters requested police perform a wellness check and she was rescued.

• I’m sure that without Wordle the lady’s daughters would still have acted, but it might have taken longer.

• And with more adverse effects as the lady was forced to go without food and essential medications for a prolonged period.

Richard Bradbury: You mentioned a neuroscience angle to this. What is Wordle doing to our brains?

Matt Armitage:

• So, this is from an article by Penny Paxman, a professor of psychology at the university of Calgary.

• It’s been syndicated on a number of different sites under different titles but I think the original appeared on a site called The Conversation.

• We’ve got the links in the episode description.

• Back in: 2011

• which she posits that playing Wordle should create similar results to because both focus on your word memory and ask you to shuffle letters to form words.

• And as I mentioned before about getting into that mindset of the game, the study found that mental processes changed quite quickly to adapt to the demands of the game.

• A bit of background - The study analysed competitive Scrabble players.

• So they found the kind of things you might expect – these competitive players were much better and faster at forming words from a random selection of letters.

• They learned skills like forming words vertically…

Richard Bradbury: Which is not something you do a lot of in languages that are written horizontally…

Matt Armitage:

• What I found interesting is that the study found Scrabble players recognized words without necessarily knowing what they meant.

• For example, that word I mentioned earlier, roate, ROATE.

• When I saw it written I had no idea what it meant, I thought it was pronounced ro-ate.

• And I used in the game before I bothered to find out that it’s an archaic form of a word I know.

• I wondered if playing Wordle would help people to spell better.

• But if Prof Paxman’s Scrabble research is also correct for Wordle, people may use the correct form of the word in the game without it penetrating those old spelling habits.

Richard Bradbury: There are a lot of those supposed brain training games out there. Is Wordle helping to improve our cognition?

Matt Armitage:

• There have been studies that say doing any kind of puzzle or reasoning based cognition exercises is good for the brain.

• Prof Paxman’s team found that being good at Scrabble simply made you good at Scrabble.

• It didn’t seem to make them better at anything else.

• When players and non-players were asked to play a Scrabble like game that used symbols instead of letters.

• There was no real difference between the two groups.

• The same with older people. Scrabble didn’t seem to halt that aging process and the slowing down of mental processing.

• I’m paraphrasing here - Scrabble experts made use of areas of the brain normally associated with visual memory and perception.

• Which perhaps explains why the meaning of the word is less important to them.

Richard Bradbury: In talking about this as a cultural moment, or an addiction: what about the people that games like this don’t appeal to?

Matt Armitage:

• Sure. That’s a valid question. It’s like me: why don’t I enjoy sports?

• Billions of people get caught up in the excitement, the competition, the challenge.

• And it leaves me totally cold. Like gambling. It has no appeal to me at all.

• Prof Paxman thinks it may be contained in things that motivate us.

• It’s described as the need for cognition. People who need and will seek out mental challenges.

• They look for puzzles and games. And of course, that leaves other people as cold as soccer leaves me.

Richard Bradbury: I think we’ve got enough time for you to squeeze off some tips.

Matt Armitage:

• Ok. If you don’t want your Wordle style influenced by the hackers, it might be better to log off now.

• For those of you who prefer to watch rather than listen, there’s a 30 minute video called Solving Wordle using information theory on the 3Blue1Brown channel.

• AS I mentioned before, roate has been mentioned as a good word to start with.

• I used adieu for a while because it has so many vowels in it.

• But I found that unhelpful because you need to hit some consonants to help structure the word.

• According to Lynne Murphy, professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex in the UK’s independent.

• It’s good to use words with L, R, N and M in because they combine easily with other letters.

• Words like Clamp or drink. Steak. Tread. Table.

• She also suggests varying your start word, or using the solution word from the previous day as your starter,

• So you get a feeling of continuity.

• I find using the hard mode is actually easier – I find that without it I accidentally reuse letters or place them in squares I know are wrong.

• Hard mode stops you doing that, so it saves you losing that mistaken guess.

• But as I said before – Prof Murphy thinks a lot of it comes down to luck as much as skill.

• So play and enjoy. And if you don’t enjoy it, stop playing. It’s supposed to be fun.