Shortly after the Times acquisition, USA Today posted a list of the "11 hardest Wordle words to date": it included "WRUNG", "QUERY", and "KNOLL", none of which seem to me particularly "hard".
#Conspire magazine archive
Word soon went round that the Times had requested the takedown of the best-known Wordle archive as of March 22, however, there were plenty of places to play previous games. Plus, it builds on the bedrock of general suspicion, built of long decades of ruined beloved internet spaces - new corporate owners. This is a more or less perfect conspiracy theory: difficult to disprove, the result of highly subjective and suggestible individual judgement, prey to the phantom patterns that plague all randomness, and very vulnerable to coincidental variations in strategies and the vagaries of personally available vocabulary. Then the conspiracy theories began.Ĭhief among them was the conviction that the Times had deliberately made the game harder. However, the Times is a commercial organisation, hence the questions above. (It is possible to get very grumpy about the limitations of the game's dictionary, which includes some truly bizarre concoctions, and which fails to accept some quite ordinary ones, but I digress.) The first reaction was approval: the Times is known for its crosswords and its daily online Spelling Bee game, which asks you to make as many words as possible from a set of eight letters, one of which must appear in each word. The game was released beyond Wardle's family circle in October, and the Times' acquisition was just months later, in January 2022. Because Wordle-the-original allows only one play per day, there are also collected archives of all the daily games back to the beginning.
#Conspire magazine software
Was the Times going to start charging for the game, as the paper does for many of its others? (Maybe eventually.) Was it going to overlay it with ads? (Not so far.) Would the paper shut down the many clones that had sprung up during its first months of popularity? Because the software that makes Wordle is open source and can therefore be freely copied and modified, there are also variants, including a two-word version, Duordle an airport code version that only frequent flyers can love, Airportle an insanely hard country shape-guessing version, Worldle and a version that changes the target word with every guess, Absurdle (at least it gives you extra guesses).
Media coverage led to the game's purchase by the New York Times for a million or few.Īlmost immediately, the suspicions flew. (Soon after, we also saw complaints that people should stop doing this because the emojis were inaccessible to screen readers.) Twitter means journalists, and journalists seeing Twitter trends mean media coverage. The thing got picked up all over Twitter, fuelled by the game's emoji-generation feature, which let people post little graphical images showing their results without disclosing the guesses or solution. I, however, read Sherlock Holmes as a child, and based on the short story "The Dancing Men", immediately tried to come up with the best options for using as many of ETAOIN SHRDLU in the initial guess as possible. Some of my friends like to choose a new random word every day. You refine your guess until you either run out of chances or hit on the right word. For each guess, the game shows you which letters you've placed correctly, which appear in the word but are wrongly placed, and which are not present. If you haven't played it, Wordle offers you six chances to guess a five-letter word. Wordle - a play on the last name of its creator, Josh Wardle - is just challenging enough to be interesting, but simple enough to demand only a few minutes. The autumn of 2021 saw a craze for a new word game. Wendy Grossman on Wordle, new owners and the genesis of a conspiracy theory.
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