VIRAL HOBBY CALMS ANGST
Puzzled by all those yellow and green squares in your social media feeds? Here’s why everyone’s obsessed with Wordle, the latest online sensation
To cope with the stressors of his job as a critical care doctor in Scarborough, Joshua Landy has found a new morning ritual.
It involves picking up his phone and typing “Wordle” into his search bar. Almost immediately, 30 square boxes appear — five across and six down. Then Landy, along with 2.7 million people around the world, tries to guess the five-letter word of the day in six attempts.
“I take a break each morning and do the puzzle using the funniest words I can think of,” the ICU doctor said. “Then my friends all roast each other for wasting guesses in our group chat.
“It’s nice to do something that feels normal for five minutes,” said Landy, who has played the game every morning for the last 10 days.
As the world grapples with another wave of COVID-19 driven by the Omicron variant, Wordle has become a fixture in the lives
of millions almost overnight. The word game, created by Brooklynbased software engineer Josh Wardle as a gift for his partner, was fairly obscure when it was launched in October. Now, it’s one of the most popular games of the day.
The game is simple: After each guess, the tiles turn grey for letters that are not in the word, yellow for letters that are in the word but in the wrong position, and green for letters that are in the correct space.
Players have one day to solve the puzzle before the game resets with a new word.
Its meteoric rise is largely driven by social media, where players have taken to posting their scores in the form of yellow, green and grey square emojis. It has also become something that people look forward to each morning, at a time when the pandemic’s end feels nowhere near.
“It’s just calming all around, and you know what you’re going to get,” said Crystal Sales, a Toronto-based advertising strategy director who has been working from home for most of the pandemic. Sales said she plays Wordle every morning after drinking her coffee and helping her son log on to virtual school.
“Instead of opening Apple News or opening Instagram, I just play Wordle, and there’s nothing else that’s going to distract me from it.”
Like many drawn to the game, Sales learned about Wordle when she saw the boxes all over her Twitter feed. Now, even her workplace has a Slack channel dedicated to discussing the word of the day each morning. For Sales, Wordle has also become a stress-free, fun way to socialize with colleagues across Canada while working from home.
Kathy McPherson, a Toronto woman who also works from home, said the appeal of Wordle is that it’s hard enough to be a challenge, but simple enough to not be frustrating. “It gives you a little kick when you get it,” she said, adding the fact that it only allows you to play once a day makes it that much more special.
“It is a better thing to do than just doomscrolling (on Twitter) and seeing what bad news is out there,” McPherson said. “It’s a more fun way to start the day.”
It’s yet to be seen whether the hype around Wordle will be here to stay. McPherson said that, to her, the game is akin to the previous trends that ebbed and flowed during quarantine, like baking bread, binge-watching “Tiger King” or tiedye crafts.
“There’s all sorts of different things that people are picking up to keep themselves busy and keep their mind off all the terrible news,” McPherson said.
Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at Western University, said he is a fan of the game, but tends to agree it could just be a phase.
“At a time when people are feeling the impact of the pandemic on their mental health, they will likely reach for some light relief every now and then,” Owen said. “We’ve all tried to amuse ourselves in lots of different ways, and anything new and engaging will tend to get more attention than anything that’s been around for a while.
“It’s sort of a perfect storm,” he added. “It’s short, simple to do and engages the brain in a way that feels more constructive than sitting in front of the TV, and it has this social element, too.”
For now, the game has ignited joy at a time when many are in need of it.
“It is refreshing and nice, as banal as it may sound,” Owen said. “It’s refreshing for people to have something positive to put up on their Twitter feed in the morning.”