My family texting thread has been running since some Christmas nobody can quite pinpoint anymore, and for its whole life it's been used for exactly two things: logistics and dog photos. Who's picking up Mom from the airport. Did anyone let the dog out. Is the wifi doing that orange blinking thing again.
This week it turned into something else entirely. Now it's just rows of green and yellow squares, no words attached, sent by people who two weeks ago I would not have called competitive about anything.
If you haven't run into it yet (lucky you, genuinely), it's a little word game called Wordle. One puzzle a day. Six guesses to land a five letter word, and when you're done you can copy out a little grid of colored squares, green for right letter right spot, yellow for right letter wrong spot, gray for nope, and paste it wherever without spoiling the actual word for anyone else. A guy named Josh Wardle built it, reportedly for his partner who likes word games, and it sat around barely used for months before it started spreading through Twitter over the last couple weeks. Now everyone I know does it before they've had coffee.
I'll admit I resisted for a while. I don't love games with a built-in social component, mostly because I'm bad at most of them and don't enjoy the daily reminder of that. But my brother sent his grid into the family chat with a little "6/6, barely survived," and I got curious enough to try it myself, and now I'm in it too, refreshing the site every morning like it's got new content instead of the exact same one puzzle sitting there until midnight.
What's actually interesting to me, the part that I think explains why this spread the way it did, isn't the game itself. It's the restraint. One puzzle. No ads, no login, no streaks-reset-if-you-miss-a-day guilt trip, no infinite version you can grind through at 1am. Wardle built it without any tracking or monetization, on purpose, which in January 2022 feels almost like a stunt. Everything else on your phone wants fifteen more minutes out of you. This wants ninety seconds and then it lets you go.
(Small complaint while I'm here: the people who post their grid with the actual letters typed out next to it, so you can reverse-engineer the answer if you look for half a second, are monsters and should be stopped. I'm not naming names. You know who you are, Dave.)
It's a strange week to have a tiny word game be the thing dominating my group chat, because the actual tech and business headlines this week were not small. Microsoft's $68.7 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard is still sitting in every tab on my browser, and I don't have much to add to that pile that a hundred bigger blogs haven't already said better. Netflix also had a genuinely rough week: the stock dropped something like 20% after they told investors subscriber growth is slowing down a lot more than Wall Street wanted to hear. Crypto had one of its uglier weekends too, bitcoin sliding under $35k as everyone braces for the Fed to start raising rates. And on top of all that, airlines were scrambling over the new 5G rollout near airports, with some flights getting scrapped over altimeter interference worries. Big, loud, number-heavy stories, the kind that eat up every tech outlet at once.
None of that showed up in my group chat this week. Not once. Just squares.
If I had to find the actual story in all this, it's that the big feed-driven headlines still win the news cycle, but the thing that got my whole extended family, including a great aunt who still calls the internet "the internet machine," doing the same tiny ritual at the same time every morning is a plain webpage with no ads and exactly one puzzle a day. No infinite scroll required, no account, nothing to install. It's a little quaint, honestly. I'll take it over another earnings call any day of the week.