He touches fish for 4 hours a day, treating the office as his bedroom, and recently he often has a tight brow and a solemn gaze, staring at the screen as if he is thinking about a major philosophical proposition. But when you get closer, you'll find that he's just playing Handus, a web-based idiom guessing mini-game.
Another English version of the word-filling game called Wordle caught fire on the Internet earlier. At the end of 2021, major overseas social platforms will begin to be increasingly brushed by mysterious patterns composed of green, yellow, gray and black color blocks. The screen is full of color blocks, which look like some kind of encrypted message, and it looks like a disorderly Tetris block. And their real identity is actually the players' Wordle record.
(Netizens are "surfing with Wordle" on Internet platforms at home and abroad Source: Xiaohongshu & Twitter & Weibo)
A group of young people who claim to use PS5 and Xbox town houses, are obsessed with 3A masterpieces and dabble in various mobile games, have taken the lead in this screen-filled guessing game.
As more and more players flock to the world of Wordle, we wonder, how did this puzzle mini-game catch fire? In what ways does it meet the needs of modern people?
1. What is Wordle that has recently caught fire?
First, let's do a simple science popularization for new players who are hearing about Wordle for the first time. Friends who are already familiar with this part of the content can choose to skip.
Wordle is an English word guessing mini-game that updates a five-letter English word every day. The player's goal is to guess the correct answer within 6 chances according to the prompt.
(Game initial interface, image source: Wordle)
The gameplay is very simple, the player only needs to enter a five-letter word in the text box, such as water, other, actor, etc., to start a round of the game. As for the clues about the enigmatic words, they are judged according to the color of the letters.
If the letter appears green, it means that the letter is in the answer and is in the correct position; appearing in yellow indicates that the letter guessed correctly, but the position is wrong; appearing in gray indicates that the letter is not in the answer at all.
(Correct answer on February 15, 2022, source: Xiu Gao)
In the case of the Wordle title on February 15, we typed the word "VALID" in the first round of attempts, where the letter A is yellow, indicating that the enigmatic word contains the letter A, but it is not positioned correctly.
In the second attempt, we replaced a word "ABACK" that contained both the letter A and was in a different position than the first. The letter A, which turns first, is green, indicating that the answer word begins with A.
So on the third attempt, we entered the "AGREE" starting with A and got a new clue about the yellow letter R.
Wordle is characterized by typing a word and then arranging and combining the next new word according to the exclusion method. In this way, we used a simple and rude "think of where to fill in" guessing method, and after 6 attempts, we successfully screened out the correct answer. It is worth noting that the game can only be played once a day, and the questions are updated on time at 0 o'clock every day.
Compared with other high-end mobile games with exquisite drawing styles and diverse gameplay, Wordle is like a puzzle game in the newspaper, testing the player's vocabulary, Sense of English language and luck. And behind this game that makes people rack their brains to recall high school English classes, there is actually a romantic love story.
Wordle developer Josh Wardle is a programmer in Brooklyn. In order to help his wife relieve her boredom during the epidemic, he invented this simple crossword puzzle and named the game Wordle after his last name.
Initially, Wordle's audience was only the developer's family, until October 2021, when Josh Wardle released the game on his personal website, Wordle entered the public eye and received excellent response.
According to the New York Times, on November 1, 2021, Wordle had only 90 players. Just two months later, more than 300,000 people filled in words online; as of mid-February 2022, Wordle had an average of more than one million daily active users and was still growing at a high rate.
2. How did Wordle catch fire?
Wordle's popularity should be attributed to its social sharing function.
Today's social media not only acts as a communication tool, but also as an area of people's online life. In a highly mobile modern society, social media can bridge the social fractures that come with migration. People share their lives on social platforms and resonate with others, and for sharers, they can reap the security of "gregariousness".
Either out of the joy of unveiling the mystery, or because the problem is too difficult, the sharing button that appears immediately after completing Wordle allows players to bring their current emotions to more people. Wordle has also become a social currency in the process of people's continuous sharing.
("So hard to answer, is there still a royal law?") Is there a law?" Image Source: Twitter)
(The second time I guessed the correct answer = "I am better than everyone" image source Twitter)
Wordle is a guessing game, and sharing the answer is to leak the mystery, which is originally a thing that makes other players feel "down". But in December 2021, players @irihapeta a whim and created a way for game participants to share their game results without giving a break – the exact green, yellow, gray, and black emojis we mentioned at the outset.
The arrangement logic of Emoji corresponds to the prompt method of the game, and the sharer can use different color blocks to present his breakthrough process in front of netizens in the form of "manual coding".
(Game developer Josh Wardle pays tribute to @irihapeta's creative air credit: Twitter)
Soon, these mysterious patterns made of green, green, yellow and yellow splicing together spread like a virus to all corners of the Internet. Each graphic and text combination of the release content, and then hang a variety of Wordle hashtags that make people more belonging, like a membership system image. The multi-layered sense of mystery attracts a steady stream of fresh players to the game.
As the game grew in popularity, on January 31, 2022, The New York Times acquired Wordle for a "seven-figure undisclosed price" and made a minor redesign of it. At present, you need to circumvent the wall to open Wordle.
The popularity of Wordle has also provided developers of other languages with ideas to imitate. For example, Chinese "HanDou", Japanese "漢字ル" and so on.
According to the description of the developer of Handu, Handushi largely inherits the gameplay of Wordle, unlike the developers of Handushi, who split each Chinese character into four parts: Chinese characters, vowels, vowels, and tones, and each color matching.
Every time the game starts, the player can usually get 1/4 of the core information about the idiom through two prompts, followed by the player's vocabulary, or Baidu search and cross-analysis capabilities.
(Handle vocabulary on February 15, 2022 Source: XinZai)
Players will have ten chances to guess a four-word idiom, which tests the player's mastery of the idiom.
3. Why do people like to play Wordle?
Looking back at the beginning of the crossword puzzle, on December 21, 1913, Arthur Wayne designed the world's first crossword puzzle and published it in the New York World. At that time, newspapers were an indispensable source of information in people's lives. Crossword puzzles based on newspapers were once popular in the United States in the 1920s.
Time to the 21st century, in the game genre is more and more abundant today, why the ancient crossword puzzle is still vigorous? How did the "highlight moment" that was once a crossword puzzle be reproduced? We analyze several factors.
Get a sense of accomplishment
Not satisfied with the same state of life, breaking through difficulties and solving problems is the source of people's immediate sense of achievement, and it is also the reason why many crossword puzzlers are keen to solve puzzles.
This also conforms to the behavioral logic of the word-filler game.
Will Schotts, editor of The New York Times crossword puzzles, once proposed the theory that "nature hates vacuums" for crossword puzzles. He thinks that if someone sees an empty black-and-white grid, they can't help but want to fill it.
And once the puzzle is solved and the blanks are filled, an instant sense of accomplishment arises. "It's like doing the last big question on the math test paper, and when it's hard to make it, I can't help but tell everyone," Xiaomei in the editorial department said of the feeling of making Wordle every time.
Learn something new
In the crossword puzzle setting, the player is often seen as someone with a certain level of education and problem-solving skills.
In the case of Wordle, for example, there is no special connection between the words it gives each time, but the player's mastery of the vocabulary can directly determine the steps, speed and accuracy of the answers. When they can't guess the answer, many players also choose to look for the answer on the Internet, and this process is learning.
Social currency
Since having Wordle, solving problems together and suggesting answers to each other has become a part of the daily life of the newsroom. "Did you do today's Wordle?" Become a substitute for "Eat?" "A new type of social greeting.
Online, we've also found Wordle on different social platforms. By sharing their views on the game, the relationship between netizens and netizens has sublimated to the realm of "both understanding and speech", which is not easy in today's Internet environment where "whether the skirt is blue and black or white gold can be noisy for n years".
Eventually, the conversation returned to Wordle. Although the rules of the game are simple, it is indispensable to achieve game achievements without "Goldfinger". So we helped you collect some tips about making it easier to achieve "overtaking in corners":
The most likely alphabets to appear:
1、E（12.49% of words）
2、T（9.28% of words）
3、A（8.04% of words）
4、O（7.64% of words）
5、I（7.57% of words）
6、N（7.23% of words）
7、S（6.51 of words）
8、R（6.28% of words）
9、H（5.05 of words）
10、L（4.07% of words）
11、D（3.82% of words）
12、C（3.34% of words）
Note: Not proven, only for entertainment reference.
Write at the end
In the past, people had many requirements for games: new gameplay, face-to-face equipment, advanced interaction methods...
But it is such a simple crossword puzzle that allows people to calm down, spend 5 minutes, 10 minutes to cultivate their concentration, and abandon impetuousness in this moment to find themselves.
From the perspective of improving the pursuit of life, people nowadays may be more looking forward to pure happiness in the game. Going from complicated to simple has become one of the keywords that many players evaluate a good game, or even not one.
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4. Zhu Yiqi, 100 years have passed, why are some big foreign newspapers still keen on crossword puzzles? ，2021.
5. Augarde， Tony (2003). The Oxford Guide to Word Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-866264-5.