In the middle of last year, software engineer Josh Wardle made a crossword puzzle for his partner, Wordle. In October, Wordle was officially launched as a web game. In November, fewer than 100 people played Wordle, and two months later, that number exceeded 300,000. Images of green, yellow, and gray grids circulated widely on social media, representing a classic paradigm of casual gaming success: simple, easy, viral, and spreading to every social medium that people have access to.
After the success of "Wordle", many versions with similar content and different languages have also been launched, and in some languages with a wide range of use and a large number of people, the popularity of the variant "Wordle" is not lost to the original English version. Behind the continued popularity of multilingual versions, some subtle communication and integration are constantly happening.
Anthony is the author of The Handus, the Chinese character for "Wordle". In this game of "parody" and "tribute", he still tries to communicate and express.
From word guessing games to traffic centers
As a game, Wordle is so simple that it hardly takes time to learn. It consists of a set of 5×6 grids and a virtual keyboard, and the player has 6 chances to guess a word made up of 5 letters. During the word guessing process, the game will give 3 kinds of hints: green means that the letter is in the correct position; yellow means that the target word contains the letter, but not in the correct position; and gray means that the target word does not contain the letter.
Simple and clear Wordle rules
This gameplay isn't the first of Wordle's, and similar crossword puzzles date back more than a century. By 1955, Jotto, a two-player crossword puzzle, had a very similar set of rules to Wordle, except for using pen and paper as a carrier. In the 1980s, many countries broadcast crossword puzzles on television. Today, people can still play similar crossword puzzles in newspapers, magazines, and apps.
Jotto, a popular crossword puzzle for two in the 1950s
But only Wordle caught fire. Author Josh Wardle mentioned in an interview that he initially just wanted to make a simple, fun, free game, but Wordle quickly became more popular than he could have imagined. After a wave of word guessing games with millions of people on social platforms, Wordle was acquired by an established media outlet for millions of dollars.
Looking back now, Anthony, who is also a software engineer, believes that wordle's success has its inevitability, and it fits the viral marketing communication model. Anthony said that Wordle has a lot of "well-done and right" design, and in his opinion, there are three main points:
One is simple, there is almost no need for any entry threshold, anyone can play; the second is a daily question, so that players can "punch the card" as a habit; the third is to provide the same question for all players at the same time.
Doing the same question as everyone else will significantly amplify the player's sense of accomplishment on social platforms. Many people will compare with friends, I used 3 times to guess correctly, you used 4 times or did not guess correctly, I am better than you, at least luckier than you. This sense of accomplishment is greater than simply guessing the right words, and the game is more enjoyable to players.
After completing Wordle, the game automatically generates a set of color blocks that players can share on social platforms without spoilers
"One question a day" is more like hunger marketing. Anthony said that in terms of gameplay, "Wordle" is not particularly fun, if you do hundreds of levels like a normal game, let the player play all the time, many people may not be interested in playing five or six levels. "One question a day can keep people remembering it," Anthony says, "and spending three or five minutes a day playing a game, you'll feel overwhelmed and remind yourself that you're going to keep playing tomorrow." It's a clever way. ”
As for the social news that makes Wordle further popular, it is both a coincidence and an inevitability under the premise that the number of gamers and the scope of circulation are gradually expanding. In February, an 80-year-old Wordle player in the United States was caught in a burglary, and her daughter was alarmed because she did not launch the punch card game on time, and then called the police, and after 17 hours of kidnapping, the player was successfully rescued. In this process, "Wordle", as a key point for the daughter to find the mother's abnormality in time and fight for rescue time, reflects that "the game plays an important role in life", and at the same time, "Wordle" itself has gained more attention.
Denyse Holt, an 80-year-old player rescued from the kidnapping, made headlines along with Wordle along with her name
But at first, Anthony didn't think Wordle could be so popular, nor did he think to imitate it. The reason why I will do "Han Du", he said, is that the real opportunity is a meme.
"Wordle" and "Handus"
Anthony is 25 years old and has just stepped out of college. He does an open source community project in a French company, "the core product is mainly open source, and then rely on open source products to do some ecological things, in this way to make a profit." He said he did remote development, changing cities every once in a while, "like working while traveling."
Anthony was introduced to Wordle early on, when it wasn't as popular as it is now, but it already had some popularity in the circle of software engineers. Anthony was more focused on how it looked on a web page— how to make a beautiful web page in a relatively simple way. He said that if you want to teach others how to write web pages, Wordle is the best example.
Engineers' initial focus on Wordle was also predominantly technical. Many people record tutorial videos and post them on video platforms: How to write a "Wordle" from scratch.
Until this time, Anthony had no idea of making a "Wordle-like" game. Later, one day, a friend posted a meme in the group: someone replaced the English keyboard below the Wordle interface with a grid lined with densely packed Chinese characters, and above it were written 5 gray Chinese characters "Everything is difficult at the beginning".
Whether in the game or in reality, the current Chinese is obviously not entered in this way (Image: JinGen Lim)
This picture caused a burst of laughter in the group. After laughing, they began to think about what they should do if they really wanted to make a "Chinese wordle".
Anthony happened to be out the door that day, and he was in the car to figure out how the game might be played. He found that the most intuitive way is to split the words into vowels and vowels, guess the pronunciation first, and then determine the corresponding word. In this way, the grid can also be reduced from 5 to 4 in Wordle, and the "four-character idiom" is more in line with the habits of most Chinese character users.
Back home, Anthony spent 30 minutes making a demo and starting the test with his girlfriend, Inès.
"Initially we chose an open source database and randomly selected idioms to try." Anthony said, "But the effect is not very good, many idioms are very cold, and guessing a dozen or twenty times may not be guessed." Later, they added hints to the game, telling the player a correct set of pinyin or a correct word, further reducing the difficulty.
This is the prototype of "Handus". In "HanDuke", the player has 10 chances to guess a four-character word, and after each guess, different colors will be used to show whether the Chinese characters and pinyin are correct or not: green represents the Chinese characters, the pinyin is correct, and the position is correct; orange means that the Chinese characters, pinyin are correct, but the position is incorrect; gray means that the target words do not contain the pinyin and Chinese characters guessed by the player.
Handus game rules
After some adjustments, Anthony sent it to the engineer's friends group, who helped test it and proposed many changes.
The revised game takes into account more edge conditions. For example, polysyllabic words, such as repetition, for example, there may be two words in the same word with the same vowel or vowel but different tones, such as how to make colorblind and color-weak players can also play the game.
"The most typical example," Anthony explains, "if the first two words of a word have both vowels d, and then the player guesses a word with 3 vowels being d, according to general rules, the third d should show orange, but in the official game the third d will be gray, because the player has used up the correct position, and people can't be misled into thinking that there is another d." ”
After solving the technical problem, Anthony began to think about a more important factor: how to make more Chinese character users experience "Han Du" fluently.
Part of the experience also comes from Wordle: Author Josh and his partner Shah have chosen more than 2,300 common words from 120,000 five-letter English words to avoid being overwhelmed by obscure words. However, they also have times of negligence - when spelling the word "like", the correct answer for the day is "favor", which has caused dissatisfaction among some British players, because "favor" is written in American English, and in British English, the word is written "favour".
Handus also supports a mask function, which is convenient for players to share on social platforms
In Anthony's view, this says at least two things. One is to give players enough freedom; the other is that different players' language habits and vocabulary will vary greatly, although Handus players basically use Chinese characters as their mother tongue, but this difference is likely to become an obstacle when they play the game.
For the first point, Anthony's approach is to simplify the complexity. Influenced by the original Wordle, many variants will have their own keyboards in the game. This is not too much of a problem for most phonetic texts, but Anthony found that it is not an easy task to implement Chinese input in web pages, and even if it is done, it is difficult to reconcile, so it is better to let players use their keyboards to freely type the words they want to guess. This means that players can be free from the "four-word idiom" during the game and use trickery to try and make mistakes.
"To exaggerate, it's okay for you to lose 'one, two, three, four.'" Anthony says, "It's actually a flexible difficulty system. You can set a framework for yourself, just typing idioms, or you can type freely. For something simpler, you can also look at the tips. ”
As for the second point, it involves more content, is more complex, and makes Anthony feel more important.
Chinese speakers
Now, Anthony and Inès manually pick out 30 idioms each month, and those 30 idioms are scrambled and embedded in each day's game as answers to Next Month's Hamper.
The word picking process is a bit more complicated than expected. The context of Inès comes from Chinese Traditional, and when two people face the same idiom, they often encounter situations where the words, word order, and understanding of meaning are not exactly the same. Sometimes, Anthony brought up a word, and Inès said he hadn't learned it, and Some of the words Inès chose, anthony had heard about it for the first time.
When choosing words, Anthony and Inès prefer words that both sides can understand and use frequently. However, Anthony also believes that different ways of writing the same idiom may make the player more aware of the language they use - although it is related to Chinese, "Handu" is essentially a game of reasoning, through the prompts, the player is not difficult to guess the correct answer, and the process of guessing the correct answer is likely to be the opportunity to learn a new vocabulary, it only takes a few minutes, no pressure.
Open the page of "Handus", you can easily find that the game supports both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Pinyin, Zhuyin, Double Pinyin input methods, symbols, numbers two tones, and color enhancement mode. This is all to allow more players to play it.
Players who are accustomed to using phonetic symbols can also play Hand pocket smoothly
Anthony has lived in Taiwan for 6 years and has not learned Zhuyin symbols, while Inès has only learned Zhuyin symbols and has not learned Pinyin. In order to be able to play the game together, Anthony and Inès added phonetic symbols to The Handus.
In practice, phonetic symbols as a means of spelling do not require Anthony to learn from scratch. Zhuyin and Pinyin are basically similar in spelling except for different writing methods, but there are some differences in details.
Anthony gives a few representative examples: the same word "ginger" (jiāng), Pinyin will split it into vowel j and vowel iang, while Zhuyin will be divided into ㄐ, ㄧ, and ㄤ. In Handus, the former is shown as two elements and the latter is shown as 3.
Similarly, there is "one" (yī), which can still be divided into vowel y and vowel i in pinyin, but there is no independent vowel y in Zhuyin, and the symbol ㄧ can represent both vowel y and vowel i, so "one" is just ㄧ.
From a utilitarian point of view, a game needs to reach more people in order to get more attention. But Anthony wanted to make Handus a little more culturally inclusive. "A Chinese game doesn't have to be limited to people who use pinyin, such as Singapore, or players from other countries and regions, and I don't want them to understand the idiom but can't play the game because they don't know pinyin."
In addition to pinyin and zhuyin, "Handou" also supports double-pinyin input
For developer Anthony, the process of making "Handus" also gave him a deeper understanding of Chinese. When he sifted through the thesaurus, he suddenly recognized many idioms that he had never seen before. As he added features to the game, he learned about Zhuyin, Double Spelling, and Digital Tone. When making hints, he needs to be aware of the differences in phonetic and written polyphones, and not allow the player to get key information too easily.
Anthony gave another example: "For example, 'Ai' in 'Self-Hatred' will only read yì in this word, then when the player enters, other occasions are judged by aì, and only when he enters the correct word will yì be displayed." Correspondingly, the game also uses technical means to avoid hints such as "yì" – for most players, this is equivalent to telling them the answer directly.
In Anthony's view, the characteristics of different languages and the difference in the understanding of the mother tongue by different developers are another important reason for the emergence of multilingual versions after wordle's popular social platform - regardless of the level of English, people are still more willing to play games in their native language, especially if the game itself is closely related to the language.
Feedback from some players gave him affirmation of his ideas. After Handus was posted on Twitter, someone commented: "Finally back home." ”
Keep trying
Is there anything else that can connect Chinese with programming?
Handus isn't Anthony's first attempt. Two or three years ago, a team of Chinese students studying in the United States created a programming language that uses Chinese characters. As the name suggests, this set of languages allows users to write code in a "who cares" way. The main creative team has 3 members, and Anthony is one of them.
Practicality was not the primary factor in Anthony's creation of the "Vertei programming language". More importantly, he wanted to do something related to Chinese culture from the perspective of a programmer, whether it was a program or a game, "Wen Yan Wen" or "Han Du", which made him feel interesting.
Some people think that its gimmicks are more than practical, but Anthony believes that it is interesting to use programs to represent Chinese characters
"Programming in Chinese language" is an introductory tutorial written by the author in Chinese language
However, Anthony felt that Handus was still some distance away from the real game. He usually likes to play games, especially simulated business and independent games, and "Ice Age", "Alien Factory" and "Fez" are his favorite works. In his mind, a good game is a complex system, art, music, artistry are integrated, "a field that I am in awe of." For him, entering the gaming industry in the short term is not an easy task, nor is it his goal.
For now, Anthony is thinking about how to run Handus. It wasn't difficult for him. Since he is doing an open source community, he maintains many projects every day, one more and one less, which makes little difference.
What's more, Handus itself is also open source. Anthony said that if there is really no energy to maintain in the future, or there are other changes, someone in the community may take over the project and keep "Handus" going.