So the New York Times bought Wordle. This happened back on January 31st, reportedly for "low seven figures," which is a very polite way of saying somewhere north of a million bucks for a website that is, structurally speaking, a five-letter guessing game with a colored grid and zero ads. Josh Wardle built the thing for his partner because she likes word puzzles, and now it belongs to the paper that also owns the crossword and that acrostic thing nobody does. Every outlet has already written the "how a side project became an overnight sensation" piece, so Im not going to do that one again here. What I actually want to talk about is my dads texting habit.
My dad is 61. He does not use Twitter. He barely uses email in any way I'd call functional. Half his sent folder is drafts he forgot to send three weeks ago. But somewhere around the second week of January he discovered Wordle, and now every single morning, without fail, at 6:47 AM, my phone buzzes with a screenshot of green and yellow squares and the words "got it in 4, you?" No context. No "good morning." Just the grid.
At first I found this mildly annoying, because 6:47 AM is not a time I want to be doing word puzzles, or honestly doing anything. But it's been almost a month now and the four of us — me, my dad, my sister, and my aunt who somehow got looped into the chat despite not being related to any of us by blood, shes my moms college roommate, its a whole thing — have not missed a single day. Thats longer than any group project Ive been part of has lasted without someone going silent for a week.
Heres my actual opinion on the sale, since I said I wouldnt do the standard writeup: I think its fine, and I also think it doesnt matter yet. The Times has said it'll stay free "initially," which is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I fully expect it to end up behind the same metered paywall as everything else on that site within the year. When that happens my family chat will either (a) all individually not notice because none of us are subscribers and it'll just quietly vanish from our lives, or (b) my dad, who does have a Times subscription because he likes the crossword app, will keep sending screenshots and the rest of us will have to find some knockoff clone to keep up. There are already about six of those floating around app stores and browser tabs, and most of them are bad in the specific way that all rushed clones are bad: too many attempts, ads jammed in the corner, word lists that let you guess "QQQQZ" and get mad when it doesn't count.
The other thing nobody's really talking about, that I think is the more interesting part, is that the entire appeal of this game is the constraint. One puzzle a day. Everyone gets the same word. No archive to binge, no infinite mode, no login. That is such a weird, almost hostile design decision by 2022 standards, where every app wants you opening it forty times a day and every game wants a battle pass. Wordle just sits there once and makes you wait. Im honestly a little worried the acquisition is going to sand that off eventually, because "keep people coming back exactly once and no more" is not a metric anybody at a media company gets rewarded for optimizing toward.
Anyway. Todays word took me five guesses because I opened with STARE like an idiot and got nothing green, then wasted a second guess confirming there was no A anywhere in the word, which in hindsight I should have just assumed given how my mornings have been going lately. My dad got it in three. He has not let me forget this over text for the last two hours. The group chat is thriving regardless of who ends up owning the website behind it, and honestly thats the part of this story I actually care about.