Waiting for Wordle

It’s 11:00 p.m. and I’m still up, waiting for Wordle.

As I am certain you know, the new Wordle game drops – becomes available – at midnight wherever you may be. And so, surprisingly stupidly consistently, for about two and a half months I’ve not gone to bed before 12:03 a.m.

Oh, I could probably go to bed and get to sleep (and have once or twice). But the first time I awoke, to pad to the bathroom, I’d power on my phone to get what my friend calls “that shot of dopamine.”

I am really good at this game. I am 73 for 73, with a mean score of 3.92 guesses, a median of 4, and a mode of 3. Seventy-three for dang 73! I think it is because I studied language – psycholinguistics – and I’m just amazingly smart.

Trouble is, EVERYONE is good at this game. And so here is my hypothesis – the brilliance of this game is it SEEMS hard, but in fact it is easy. I believe that if one is careful to attend to the data that are presented (i.e., don’t reuse a letter you know is wrong), and one brings to the fore what we know subconsciously about English orthography (if that second letter is an H, the first letter will be an S, a C, or a T, maybe a W, maybe a P, MAYBE a vowel) then it just might be the case that the game is de facto winnable in six guesses. (If you don’t know how to play Wordle, I’m not gonna explain it to you here – and why are you still reading this?)

I thought I was diligent about imposing the “hard” mode on myself – whereby you must use the letters you’ve learned about in their correct places. But thrice I’ve realized that I might lose this way, and so have deviated to the “easy” mode those few times. Knowing _ATCH after the second guess, there are still seven possibilities. So I entered “BLIMP,” to eliminate (or confirm) four of the possible consonants. By then I was assured of getting it in six guesses.

Also, clearly, the “manufactured scarcity” of the thing makes it dearer. I get just one game a day. Better make it a good one!

So, Wordle used to make me think I was really smart, but now I just think it, and its creator, are really smart, given that it SOMEHOW gives the impression of being hard, but fundamentally it is easy.

Oh dang. It’s 11:58. Gotta go.