Grids of Luck, Skill, Desperation, and Perseverance

On the face of it, Wordle appears to be a word-guessing game. Six tries to crack a five-letter word. Everyone who plays Wordle on a particular day, share the daily word of the game (and I’ll come to it shortly on why that makes such a difference!). But what sets Wordle apart from other word-guessing games is the intense feedback we receive as we play. The graphicality of the feedback, that is letters turning grey if they don’t belong to the word, yellow, if they do but aren’t in the right place, and green, if the letters are where they are supposed to be in the word, makes Wordle more than just a game of chance.?

We start off playing the game thinking it’s totally random, but as we peel off the layers, we realize that we’ve got bags of agency in it. As we progress through the game, we are no more just guessing words, but using words to scan for letters. That’s the reason some of the current hot debates around Wordle range from should you enter a vowel first, if yes, which one, to what should be your start word. If you come to think of it, for a game that looks so arbitrary, there’s a lot we can do even with the limited tools we have. In a way, the game attacks our belief that more the agency the better, which is not true. There are a lot more interesting games which are confined in nature. For e.g. Poker – it’s a game of random draws and a few possible moves.?

Another striking feature – the one that got me into it – is the design of the game, especially the shareability of the result. The mechanics of Wordle is pretty much the same as that of any other word game, but the feedback graph, that is the stack of 5 x 6 grids we see people sharing on social media is loaded with stickiness. In fact, it’s difficult to think of any other game that allows a player’s progression to be expressed so neatly in one quick image. If you’ve played the game for the day, and observed others’ results to see how the grey, yellow, and green grids have shown up for them, you begin to have a feeling of occupying a similar space with the other players.

C. Thi Nguyen in his book, Games: Agency As Art, argues that every art form is a crystallization of something natural that happens. Games are a distinctive form of art that work in the medium of agency. Game designers don’t just tell stories or create environments but tell us what our abilities will be in the game.?

When we play games we are voluntarily taking unnecessary obstacles. But the reason we do so is because games specify our agency by specifying the goal. Games tell us what to care about; they give us a clear goal to aim for. In the backdrop of an overwhelming life, games give us a kind of control, bringing a sense of executional peace to it. In case of Wordle, we are set with a clear mandate to identify the five-letter word.

To quote the author, “Games offer us an existential balm, a relief from the value-confusion of our ordinary lives.” It’s hard to believe that such rigidly defined forms of agency could help us become more free, especially when those rules are designed by another. But it’s through the rigid specifications that we communicate agencies.

The real effect of Wordle’s puzzle-a-day feature is the social effect. The game is being kind to us because it gives us just one puzzle a day instead of getting us to binge infinitely. But it is this?universality and scarcity that presents to all its players a shared goal. One common goal to crack the word-of-the-day unites all the players with a similar agency. We start imagining what it’s like to be in someone's place who’s at the moment finding his or her way to solve what you just did – or maybe couldn't.

Though with all this gamification, we might endanger ourselves by wanting to export such clarity into the rest of our lives – that is wanting to have clearly quantified successes. What works so well in games may actually wreak havoc on our ordinary lives! The author captures the dangers of gamification in a larger phenomenon called value capture. While the books does elaborate on what the term entails, I'll just cite a few examples: we start wearing a FitBit with a goal to improve our health, but sooner or later we get fixated on simply maximizing our step-counts. Another relatable example: we enroll ourselves in schools to gain education, but ultimately only start caring about our GPAs.

To be honest, had it not been for Wordle and it’s stickiness, I would not have been prodded to learn this side of games and it’s effects on our lives. For now, I am just leaving all of you with this slim hope C. Thi Nguyen leaves his readers with – that when we play games, let us be absorbed by the pursuit of clear explicit goals, but when it comes to subtler experiences may we practice fluidity in our agencies.

And no better way to put this is in practice than to be aware to begin with.