Why Wordle is the Wholesome Internet Trend We Need Right Now

In a world full of ⬜, be a 🟩.

The latest internet word game fandom is proving that maybe we really can have nice things.

You might’ve seen those yellow and green spotted grids popping up more and more on your socials. Heck, maybe you’ve already joined the trend and are checking every 24 hours for a new daily word to guess.

It's all thanks to Wordle—a free, browser-based game that asks players to correctly guess a five-letter word in six tries, with hints along the way. If you run out of tries, you have to wait til the next day for a new puzzle.

Sounds pretty simple, huh? That’s kind of the point, and people are loving it. Wordle has gone from just 90 players in November to more than 300,000 now.

In the often tainted world we’re living in, Wordle is exactly what the internet needs right now. Here’s why:

It’s pure, simple fun.

Remember Temple Run, Words with Friends, and Draw Something? We were all addicted to those games, but they demanded a lot of your time and attention.

That’s what Wordle does differently. It asks for three minutes of your day and doesn’t beg you to scroll and click endlessly. Wordle’s site has no ads, no paywalls, and no app version.

Creator and software developer, Josh Wardle (yup, Wardle=Wordle), intends to keep it that way. He says he doesn’t want the game to take over your life.

“I don’t understand why something can’t just be fun,” he said in a recent interview with BBC Radio 4.

 “Wordle is very simple, and you can play it in three minutes, and that is all you get. There are also no ads, and I am not doing anything with your data. And that is also quite deliberate."

It was literally created FOR LOVE.

Here’s the most wholesome part of all. It turns out Josh Wardle created the game during lockdown for his partner Palak Shah, who loves crosswords.

He sent it to his WhatsApp group before sharing it with the world.

“It’s really sweet,” Shah told the New York Times. “This is definitely how Josh shows his love.”

Um. Make me my own word puzzle game or I’m literally not interested.

It’s the distraction we need right now.

There’s no denying the internet can be a pretty dim place, and the pandemic hasn’t really helped its cause.

That’s why we sorta need to lap up every bit of non-invasive, positive content we can get.

Wordle seems to exist outside of everything bad—capitalism, social media addiction, and energy fatigue to name a few.

It simply just wants you to solve a short word puzzle every day and share your results with your friends if you wish. And right now, that’s beautiful.

Header image: Towfiqu barbhuiya via Unsplash