Wordle's cult following is growing by the day. The game has entered our lives under the cover of darkness, slowly polluting my Twitter timeline since late 2021. You get six guesses to identify a five-letter word, but each time you type, the algorithmic quizmaster reveals which letters are in the correct space, which letters appear in the word but are slotted incorrectly, and which letters are not in the answer at all. (For example, today I went from TRACE to RIPEN and arrived at PERKY.) This is the kind of thing you might find in the back of a boring in-flight magazine, or with a grid of half-finished Sudoku puzzles solved with a ballpoint pen in the clouds over Missouri. But Wordle is an absolute phenomenon. I've been playing it diligently all month and have no intention of slowing down. It is an early Game of the Year favorite, right up there with Elden Ring.

It is difficult to say whether Wordle's phenomenal success has more to do with its metacultural community than with its gameplay principles. That said, at its core, it's a great puzzle, and Wordle's creator, former Reddit software engineer Josh Wardle, conceived the design as a private ritual with his word-game-loving wife long before Wordle spread across the Internet, The two had been repeatedly solving riddles in their own private marital bliss. But it's also true that Wordle is not an original idea; in the mid-2000s, the game show LINGO operated on essentially the same gimmick, and veterans of the languid after-school show will have suffered through a mind-numbing round of "Mastermind" while waiting for their father to pick them up You've probably been there. (In Mastermind, the letters were replaced by different colored pegs, but the overarching strategy was the same.)

In this sense, Wordle's rise is pure chaos theory. No one could have predicted the current of the times. The tides of virality are forever inexplicable, sometimes pushing stale ciphers to the top of the trending pages.

But I don't think Wordle's lack of originality really matters. Strangely enough, Wordle's core appeal lies in its brilliant improvement of the social atmosphere; sitting in front of Wordle is like being stabbed with a tranquilizer arrow; it's a great way to get a feel for the world of the world, and it's a great way to get a sense of what's going on in the world around you. Because, frankly, it's hard to separate the cultural artifacts from the global catastrophe of the last two years. I started Wordle last December, in the midst of the Omicron wave. It was shortly after the post-pandemic euphoria had been knocked back by an almighty mutation. We were all back to square one. Am I the only one who remembers that time as the ultimate rock bottom of a bleak, eternal, recursive covid journey? Like so many other pandemic periods (sourdough starters, last dances, guilt-free day drinking), Wordle condensed the sense of effortless, blissful peace at a time when we are craving it; Josh Wardle carefully added a sharing feature at the end of every solution; the "share" function was a great way to share the same information, and the "share" function was a great way to share the same information. In other words, the social media feed is speckled with green, yellow, and gray boxes, almost like a way to compare notes with fellow Wardleheads. Some scoff at this feature, comparing it to the dark days of Facebook's Farmville. But "personally," I relish the opportunity to avoid the discourse surrounding malignant epidemics and the death of democracy, and instead discuss the daily word with other strangers who stream into my feed.

I can't think of many other video games that are pure of heart. Animal Crossing: New Leaf probably qualifies, but it too is a franchise saddled with a rhapsodically depressing free-to-play mobile version loaded with an endless supply of penny-pinching microtransactions. Stardew Valley might count." But the game also has one of the most active NSFW communities on Reddit. (Don't say we didn't warn you.) Wordle, on the other hand, is a product that exists completely outside of time. There is only one puzzle each day, and its philosophy prevents players from falling down the rabbit hole of fidgeting and procrastination. Ideally, that philosophy will continue now that the game has been acquired by the New York Times. According to previous reports, Wordle will continue to be free. Gray Lady, don't ruin this vibe.

In an atmosphere where every fun Good Thing is instantly plundered for profit, as Blizzard desperately seeks a way to charge players for the fundamentally unmonetizable Hearthstone Mercenaries, Wordle is a positive because it must remain a rare source of energy. It is a concept so alien to our guarded sensibilities that when it is in the palm of our hand, it is truly miraculous.

I tend to solve Wordle every day, either at midnight when the new grid is uploaded or early in the morning when my girlfriend and I are not yet ready to start our day. I tell her how many times I have solved it and she tries to beat my score during her lunch break. We discuss beginning guesses, letter combinations, and tricky answers. Instead, the game has become part of our routine, akin to her decaf beer or my bodega-going. A bright spot that I can trust.