Here’s a brief interview on BBC with Josh Wardle, the creator of the Wordle game (it starts at around 1:24):
I like the idea of doing the opposite of that—what about a game that deliberately doesn’t want much of your attention? Wordle is very simple and you can play it in three minutes, and that is all you get.
There are also no ads and I am not doing anything with your data, and that is also quite deliberate.
There’s a lot to love about Wordle—that you can play it only once per day, or that you can share your result on social media in a clever, spoiler-free way (the word you have to guess on any given day is the same for all players).
On the other hand, will it last? Ian Bogost, particularly made some astute remarks regarding Wordle’s rules and its life cycle to that effect.
The interview will be taken down after four weeks, but this BBC news item has some quotes. What I didn’t know, as mentioned in this article, is that Josh Wardle was also the creator of Reddit’s The Button, an “experimental game” that ticks all the right boxes for being a social experiment.
Update January 13:: Here’s a terrifice Twitter thread by philosopher C Thi Nguyen (@add_hawk) on Wordle’s graphic social communication, and another thread by Steven Cravotta with a great story on how Wordle impacted his own game on the app store, and what he’s going to do with it.