Look at the History of Games to Grasp Wordle's Secret

Wordle! It’s a word game people are playing online. Each day, the game offers one new puzzle: Guess a five-letter English word correctly in six or fewer tries. After each guess, the game tells you which letters are correct, which are wrong, and which are the right letters in the wrong place. It’s fun! But why?

Games seem like trifles, and many are, which can make them difficult to take seriously as art or culture. Perhaps that’s why accounts of their success tend to focus on their peripheries. Wordle is easy to access, just a website you can visit from any browser or device without a download. It has what game designers sometimes call “juiciness,” a delightfulness of audiovisual response—in Wordle’s case, the way the game reveals the results of a guess letter by letter offers both drama and satisfaction. A charming backstory also underlies the game: A programmer made it for his partner, for love rather than money.

But none of these explanations captures the essence of Wordle’s seductive delight. In the game, you get six guesses to solve a puzzle. When it comes to the puzzle of Wordle, I’m going to solve it for you in four: its unoriginal design, its ritual comfort, its interpretive sharing mechanism, and—one that may disappoint you, but that you need to accept—the fact that it’s just a game, and games are fun.

Many game designers will tell you that games need to be easy to learn but hard to master. The fallacy comes from the history of Pong, one of the first popular coin-operated electronic games. Before he came up with the idea for Pong, Nolan Bushnell, who co-founded Atari, first tried to re-create a cosmic-dogfight game popular in university labs for the everyperson. The result, a coin-operated game with a plethora of indistinguishable buttons called Computer Space, was a commercial failure. But Pong was simple. It had just one knob for each player, along with an engraved instruction: insert coin. avoid missing ball for high score.

The thing is, Pong didn’t succeed because it was simple. After all, chess and Go, two games with the greatest longevity and the highest status in history, are not easy to learn. Neither is Fortnite or League of Legends. No, Pong worked because it was unoriginal: Ping-Pong, but on a weird, new computer at the bar—which wasn’t that weird and new in a context where pinball and mechanical games were commonplace.

Wordle is likewise unoriginal. It owes most of its design to its forebears: a long line of trial-and-error code-breaking games. A similar paper-and-pencil game called Bulls and Cows, in which players try to guess a four-digit number, is at least as old as table tennis. That style of design was commercialized—with great success—as the board game Mastermind around the time Pong appeared. A version with words instead of numbers or colors, called Jotto, appeared as early as the 1950s. Among its many lives, the Jotto design eventually inspired a television game show called Lingo, which aired in the late 1980s. Lingo’s puzzle design is essentially identical to Wordle’s.