Behind the spread of the three-color mysterious code, it is actually just a game.
"I never thought I'd be addicted to a crossword puzzle, which makes me feel like an office worker with a newspaper in the '50s, but I enjoy it."
Recently, a game called "Wordle" has become very popular abroad, known as another viral game since "Pokémon GO", and the above passage comes from its players. However, at home, the game did not stir up a splash, which was in stark contrast to the carnival on foreign social media.
This result was predestined at the time of its birth – because its players had to be English speakers.
The rules of the game are simple, fill in the letters and guess a 5 word. If the letter is not in the puzzle vocabulary, it will be gray, yellow if it contains the letter but it is not in the right position, and green when the letter position is also completely correct. Narrow down the puzzle based on the guessing results, a total of 6 chances, guess the puzzle correctly or consume all the times.
Depending on the problem solving process, each player gets a very different tricolor image to share
Such a monotonous crossword puzzle can also become a "out-of-the-loop hit", which game creator Josh Wardle himself did not expect, at least he said this in the face of the media. But for those who know him, the popularity of the game may not be an accident, and all the Wordle players who keep entering the game may be participants in another large-scale social experiment.
1
Wordle author's screen name powerlanguage is better known than Josh Wardle, a little-known name— the initiator of two well-known April Fools' Day events on Reddit, "The Button" and "Place."
The Button (left) and Place (right)
The 2017 Place event believes that many friends have heard of it: a huge blank canvas of 1000x1000 pixels, users can arbitrarily replace one of the colors every 5 minutes, after a large number of users to create and destroy, finally got a pixel painting, we also reported it in detail at the time.
Two years earlier, The Button, although not well known in China, was Reddit's first activity that could be called a social experiment. Conspiracy theories, factional strife, and "cult groups" have spawned countless memes.
The concept of this project is much simpler, a number that constantly counts down from 60 seconds, next to a striking button. Whenever someone presses the button, the countdown resets back to 60 seconds. Crucially, only users who registered before the event had the opportunity to participate, and each user had only one chance to press the button.
When the "button" campaign went online, the official did not make any unnecessary explanation, and it suddenly appeared on the home page. When people start discussing and experimenting with its rules, this social experiment begins.
At first people didn't know anything about it. Some say it's just a small event of unknown significance on April Fool's Day, but it's still running after April 1st; some say it's Reddit's effort to show advertisers how active users are, but there's no evidence; and others play conspiracy theories, speculating that Reddit is cooperating with some kind of data collection effort by the Department of Homeland Security.
Along with the rumors that were swirling around, at first the users simply divided into two factions, press and don't. As many hidden rules were clarified, more factional hills sprung up one by one.
According to the user's own summary, pressing the button will not only reset the countdown, but also give the user a circle marker of different colors after the ID according to the number when pressed. The different colors themselves have no special meaning, but they divide users into different groups and let them summarize their own ideas.
For example, the purple user who presses the fastest feels that they are more friendly to the new person, while others find them the least patient; the red user who presses near the end of the countdown feels that they have saved the activity, and others feel that they are the show off of the rules of sitting.
The other colors were also different, and in this way, they formed small groups because of the meaningless colors. Purple "Violet Hand", blue "Blue Clothed Society", green "Emerald Council", yellow "Illuminati", orange "Orange Revolutionary Army", red "Red Guard", and "Shadow Followers" in gray without pressing the button.
Users create specific images of different groups
It is precisely because of these strange names that the outside world once misunderstood the nature of these groups, and they were called cult gangs by the media who did not know the truth. After hearing this evaluation, they simply played the terrier to the end, giving the button more "cult" nature.
The people of the Blue Society would "swear an oath with the blue code," the Illuminati would declare that "the path to enlightenment is within the realm of 30 seconds," and the red guards would often chant: "At the last second, we will press the button at the thinnest hour of time, and we will cut through the armor and enter the flesh of space and time." ”
The event was interrupted several times due to official technical issues, but all resumed quickly and continued for more than two months. Towards the end, the faction about buttons is long gone beyond color. Shadow followers who insist on not pressing the button While the previous "doctrine" was that "buttons are a temptation that brings destruction," there are also people in the "button church" lurking in it. It's a large organization that spans colors, and they bridge the barriers between colors and encourage all users of color to work together against shadow followers.
The Knights of the Buttons are a subordinate organization under their umbrella, and their mission is to ensure that the countdown does not end. To this end, they also specially wrote a plug-in that collected gray marker accounts to ensure that the button could be pressed in time before the countdown ended. But in the end, because of the infiltration of hostile forces, they were mixed in by a white user who was not qualified to press, and the countdown ended in their close guard.
Within minutes of the countdown to zero, the official announcement was completed. Participants also quickly dropped out of the show, posting goodbyes to each other and sharing their experiences.
Josh Wardle, the initiator who had just typed out the words "end of the experiment," was busy collecting user feedback with great joy, the first blockbuster event he had planned. But his fledgling first-time plan was described by him as "like hell."
2
Back on April Fool's Day in 2013, Josh Wardle planned an event for Reddit for the first time.
They referred to Team Fortress 2 and designed a number of items for the forum that could be used. Players are randomly divided into two teams and can use items against enemy users at will. However, due to the fact that the function of these props is too strange, it can cause a lot of strange phenomena under the superposition effect, and once caused confusion in the aggressive use of the two teams.
There is a prop that replaces the keyword of other people's post titles with a "Tom Cruise" symbol, causing many posts to be unable to read properly. Another prop can put a hat on the user ID, and with the joint efforts of many people, there is a situation where a person wears dozens of hats, so that the user who reads the post must go down for a long time to continue browsing.
Before becoming a product manager by chance, Josh Wardle was educated in the arts, more focused on the output of ideas, and did not know how to deal with such sudden situations. So after only 6 hours, they ended the event, and everyone on the team breathed a sigh of relief and reached a tacit agreement to "never do it again".
Judging by the results, the 2013 campaign was undoubtedly a failure. But before the event began, josh Wardle's team did not slacken off, instead they conducted a thorough survey of all April Fools' Day events on the market before deciding to launch such an event.
In their eyes, Internet companies' annual April Fool's Day events are much the same: whether it's making a delicate video or writing a humorous fake news, it's a clichéd marketing ploy, a parrot of oneself. "A bunch of smart people sit together and show people how smart and funny they are with smug ideas. Users will find it interesting, and then there will be no then. ”
Every year on April Fool's Day, a time when a company gets the most attention from outsiders, Josh Wardle feels that this is a huge opportunity to explore, because no matter how out of the ordinary things are done, users will not feel abrupt. We should seize this opportunity to do more publicity that meets the characteristics of the product, so there is this April Fool's Day event that allows users to interact.
The logo of both teams at the event
Relying on the failure of this campaign, they learned that not all users are happy to participate in the event. If "people just want to see cat terriers," then let them still look good. Activities always serve the product, do not let the activities affect the use of the core product. But in fact, this is a mistake that many mature companies are still making.
After that, there were The Button in 2015 and Place in 2017, two activities that were remembered by the Internet. The concept of the two events seems simple, but Josh Wardle tailored it to the characteristics of the Reddit forum, so whenever someone wants to replicate their success, it is often difficult to recreate the desired grandeur.
3
Take, for example, the 2017 1000x1000 pixel megapixel painting, and there are countless websites that try to recreate it. In China, A Island and Station B, which have a good user activity, have launched similar activities, but in the end they have not provoked much splash.
The reason for this failure was once attributed to freshness, and it was believed that netizens were tired of watching it. But in fact, Reddit's activities are not original. Back in 2005, a student named Alex Tew opened a website called the "Million Dollar Home Page" to raise tuition. The website is also a 1000x1000 pixel canvas, which costs $1 per pixel. The co-op drawing game Poietic Generator, launched in 1986, does the same.
Josh Wardle may have been inspired by both projects, but it was a great success. According to his own analysis, Reddit's topic-specific plate characteristics play a crucial role in the activity.
Originally, in Reddit's forum ecology, users gathered together with points of interest as the center and were born with their own organizations. This allows them to not go it alone in the battle for pixels, confrontation and unity in the war on a plate-by-panel basis, and soon form order. A complete pixel map is not only a work representing the section, but also a publicity poster to the outside world, forming a virtuous circle in the activity.
At that event, Josh Wardle also joined the section for sharing pictures of dogs because of his appreciation of the Goodboye group pixel paintings. Here he saw how the participants in the event were organized.
The goodboye group's drawings are small, accounting for only a small part. Even so, they created an online tabular document that recorded and assigned the pixels that each person was responsible for. In order not to affect the normal discussion in the version, they even carried out the combat strategy of "combining vertical and horizontal" in the table, and finally firmly occupied the corner of the canvas.
One of the discussions, "Why one of the left puppies' clogs is bigger than the other," quickly caught his attention—he couldn't understand what they were saying at all. The other man's answer, "The Dutchman added it," also failed to make him understand.
So he went back to look at the complete pixel painting and found that the Goodboye group shared an area with the Dutch group. The two sides reached an agreement in some strange way to share a border, trading peace with the clogs on a puppy's foot.
He then learned that in addition to the superficially seen comings and goings, there was more communication and interaction within and between sections—though he still hadn't figured out why he had to put clogs on the puppy.
"The user's creativity is immeasurable, far better than a few planners sitting in a conference room and talking about it," he summed up from two successful events.
A few years later, Wordle once again replicated the success of the previous two campaigns. Although this was an accident in his mouth, it once again conformed to his original summary, and it was inevitable that people wondered, was this another of his large-scale social experiments?
4
Wordle was born from a love affair. Because his girlfriend loves crossword puzzles, Josh Wardle designed a new type of crossword puzzle for it in 2013, which is the prototype of Wordle. By chance in 2021, he shared the game with the family group, and he didn't expect everyone to like it, so he moved the game to his homepage for public release.
From the first dozen players to 300,000 players in December 2021, Wordle took two months; from 300,000 to 2 million, it only took a week; after which the game spread like a virus on social platforms in Europe and the United States, and the number of players can no longer be counted.
Wordle, a simple crossword puzzle, was initially successful from one of its core settings: a puzzle shared by players around the world every day. This makes the game a topical nature, which gradually spreads among players by word of mouth. But then the explosion of the number of players increased, but thanks to a player's idea.
The design of sharing puzzles every day allows the game to come with its own topic, but the risk of spoilers if you are not careful also makes sharing more difficult. In order to prevent spoiler puzzles, several New Zealand players came up with a way to represent the daily problem solving process in the form of color blocks, and exchanged game progress with each other.
The content of their daily whispered tweets quickly aroused the curiosity of other friends, and more people fell into the pit. Author Josh Wardle keenly discovered this method and added it to the game's sharing feature. One click to generate tiles and share them on social media quickly spread to all corners of the social media platform, and the number of players began to grow exponentially.
After the popularity of "Wordle" still has not stopped fermenting in the creative soil of players, as more and more players join, the sharing form of tiles has become various. In the beginning, players simply changed the style of the pixel tile and made it more unique in their own way.
After a few days, they were no longer satisfied with the innovation of the art style, and began to use embroidery and "Town Stacking" to show their Wordle level.
There are also players who will create magical three-color stick figures based on the pixel maps they get from playing Wordle every day, which has become a clear stream in the "Daily Wordle Club".
Now go to Google and search for Wordle, and a jumping mini Doodle will appear on the left side of the search box, which is exactly the classic yellow-green-gray tricolor of the game. "Wordle", which has appeared in many authoritative media in Europe and the United States, has undoubtedly become a new cultural phenomenon, and there are naturally social topics that follow.
For example, the spelling battle between British English and American English was the first to break out in this English crossword puzzle. Author Josh Wardle is an Englishman living in the United States, and one day in the puzzle of the game, he set a word spelled in American style as the puzzle. This made many British players fail to pass the spelling problem, so they began to denounce the author of the "forgotten book".
On his Reddit account, Twitter account and other platforms, you can see the voices of British English advocates, even under his cloud audio website account that he has not used for 9 years. Under the influence of this storm, many people have re-discussed the unsolvable question of which two Kinds of English are better or worse.
It is also the only comment he has received on the site
Everything after the popularity of "Wordle" has developed unexpectedly. No one expected that the first blockbuster game in 2022 would actually be a crossword puzzle.
Its author, Josh Wardle, has a completely out-of-the-box attitude and seems happy to see players tossing and turning their way. This seemingly simple game is becoming more and more like the human observation activities he is good at planning.
Whether or not he anticipated this, this fledgling social experiment will continue in an unknown direction with the participation of more and more players.