By Chris Satullo

Do you Wordle?

After all, much of the world is Wordle-ing these days. I know I am.

Wordle is a simple but addictive word game crafted last year by Josh Wardle, a Brooklyn techie who was just looking to amuse himself and his girlfriend. Wardle put his app into the world last October. It began diverting, then hooking, a modest but growing circle of people. 

Then someone in New Zealand had the idea of posting a jury-rigged image of their winning solution on social media.

The story of Web 2.0 is often one of users finding ways to improve or expand upon an app inventor’s idea. (It was a Twitter user who invented the hashtag.) Seizing this faraway invitation to collaborate, Wardle devised a more elegant mode for social posting. Soon, and at stunning velocity, Wordle went viral. By the dawn of this year, millions worldwide were puzzling out the daily five-letter Wordle over their tea, coffee, OJ, lassi or sarabba.

Wardle, who has a day job and had no grand self-enrichment designs when he coded the app, began scrambling to keep up with the demand pressure on his slim invention. He fretted.

Then, inevitable as the rising sun, commerce intervened. The New York Times, proprietor of Spelling Bee and the world’s most played crossword, came calling. Wardle sold his baby to the Gray Lady for a sum in “the low seven figures.” This spawned equally predictable howls and laments worldwide; the almighty American dollar had co-opted and corrupted yet another innocent thing.

The Wordle story and the game itself impart so many lessons about ourselves, our politics and our world today. To wit:

A yearning for simple and reliable

In a world awash in complex, garish and often violent multiplayer video games, Wordle poses an addictingly simple daily challenge in a cool, four-color palette. You are invited to work out the days’ five-letter word by guessing five-letter words in sequence. Wordle instantly tells you which letters in your word also appear in its daily word, and whether they are in the right spot. 

You get six guesses to combine luck and logic to solve the puzzle. Solve it in two, that’s luck. Solve it in three, that’s savvy. Solve it in six, and that’s a shudder of relief. Don’t solve it at all and a strangely powerful sense of gloom settles over you.

The game is designed to be solvable – and within five minutes. The day’s new word is posted at 12:01 a.m.; it’s always there to greet you along with the dawn. Once you solve correctly, the game gives you a countdown clock letting you know precisely how long until the next puzzle posts. That’s kind of silly, but oddly reassuring.

The circa-1990 look of Wordle’s interface is also reassuring. No complicated registration or login, no popup ads. Nothing nefarious is being done with your data or your eyeballs. 

The power of combining discipline and flexibility

Wordle rewards those who stick to an opening strategy, then have the wit to adjust based on what they learn.

The game is actually a basic version of Jotto, a pen-and-paper word game I used to play sometimes (well, OK, yes, all the time) in study hall back in high school. In Jotto, you’d try to guess your friend’s five-letter word while he did the same for your word. Over the cafeteria table, I worked out a consistent opening strategy that I’ve never forgotten and revived the instant I stumbled upon Wordle: Always begin with the same two words, which between them cover the main five vowels, several common consonants and (here’s my secret sauce) the letter Q. I find that knowing right away whether funky Q is involved avoids a lot of pain and disappointment.

Many combinations of opening words can work – as long as a) they include the five vowels and b) you never vary them. Taking the same approach each time helps tame the entropy and hone your logic.

Be ready to revise your priors

The only times I’ve failed to solve Wordle came when, after the first two guesses, I got stuck on a notion of what shape the solution might be and failed to notice other logical paths suggested by Wordle’s color-coded rendering of the letters in my previous word.

As long as I’m willing to truly take in what the gray (nope!), yellow (good letter, wrong place) and green (yes!) letters of Wordle are trying to tell me, no matter what fond hopes I’d harbored before my last guess, I solve the puzzle.

A life lesson indeed.

Remember the Y

A related lesson: The letter Y is a shifty character, sometimes consonant, sometimes vowel. Some of my closest calls, as well as several of my Wordle fails, came when my first two guesses turned up only one included vowel. If I dug in on the notion that the lone vowel must be repeated – and forgot that a Y at the end of the word was also a logical solution – that’s when I lost or needed a heart-pounding, sixth-guess save.

It’s a bad pun but good advice: Never forget the “why” in your own life. Remember when you get up in the morning your own why – the people and values you’re going to try to help and honor with what you do that day. And when others do things that annoy or appall you, take a moment to imagine the “why” behind their deeds before you judge or respond to them.

Our fate lies not in the stars, but in ourselves

Wordle plays fair (as long as you write in American English, that is; more on that in a second). If you have a high-school degree and any Wordle word is unknown to you, I have serious questions to ask of the school system you attended.

Every puzzle is solvable unless you screw up. Every time I’ve failed, it came down to having four letters right but a choice of several rhyming words. I chose the wrong one – sappy instead of happy, for instance. 

So, does that mean I was unlucky?  No, that means I wasted earlier guesses, pursued wrong paths, failed to notice what the gray, green and letter were really telling me.

I was not a plaything of fate. I was a faulty player.

The world loves to blame the Yanks

Not the baseball team in pinstripes (though they are arrogant and I hate them). Us. Americans. Josh Wardle decided to use American, not British, spellings. Leaving out the British U in words like favour gave him a larger store of five-letter words.  But recently, when the Wordle of the day was HUMOR, the outrage from outposts of the former British Empire nearly broke the Internet.

“I solved you, Wordle, but I feel cheapened in the process,” wrote one British journalist.

Combine that with the worldwide huffing and puffing over Wardle’s “sellout” to American capitalists and it proves again that no good deed is so pure and innocent that it won’t be decried by some detractors.

On the other hand …

Put something innocent into the world, just for the pleasure of it, as Josh Wardle did, and you never know how it might ripple across oceans and touch people for the good.

A Seattle woman credits Wordle with saving her mother’s life. The 80-year-old mom was being held hostage in her suburban Chicago home by a knife-wielding, mentally ill house invader. Her daughter by Puget Sound became concerned when her mother didn’t send her usual, triumphant message that she’d solved her daily Wordle, then wasn’t responding to any of her daughter’s increasingly concerned texts. The daughter called police, who checked on the home and eventually rescued the elderly hostage after a 17-hour ordeal.

So, yes, Josh Wardle left the U out of humour and took the Times’ dough. (You’re telling me you wouldn’t have? Hmmph.) Hate him if you must.

But I say he put something playful, innocent, and connective out into the world without any hope of gain.  Something that every morning offers to sharpen our wits and teach us useful lessons, if we have the wit to receive them.

In my book, Josh Wardle is a six-letter Yiddish word meaning good guy.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia