NEW YORK, NY - JULY 18: Amanda Seyfried and host Jimmy Fallon sing during the "Google Translates ... [+]
I’m a little obsessed with Wordle right now.
I even took a radical step. In Google Chrome, you can set pages to appear when you start the browser up. I have now added Wordle, a game where you pick letters to form a word. It’s like Wheel of Fortune had a baby with Scrabble, except that the twist here is you only see one puzzle per day. It’s also not an app and only runs on the web.
In a massive unifying moment across the Internet, it’s the same word for all of us. To play, you guess at the word and then see which letters are correct and in the right spot or correct but in the wrong spot. Like anything new and addictive, it’s fun because it’s different.
As is often the case, social media played a major role in making Wordle such a massive hit. You could make the case that Jimmy Fallon started it all.
He posted recently about it:
He didn’t stop there.
I’ve seen tweets from Fallon about his score for the day, which is a key feature. Wordle let’s you tweet or copy and paste the results into a Facebook post, which looks cryptic to the uninitiated. There’s a score and a series of green and yellow blips.
Everything cool starts a bit obscure. Wordle is just the latest example.
For me, it’s the real power of these platforms that they can spread something like a little daily puzzle game across the globe in not just days but even hours.
I first noticed a colleague who posted her score on Facebook and was interested enough to at least look up the game. Ironically, I didn’t even bother trying it at the time. Then I noticed someone else posted his score. The “fear of missing out” kicked in. I tried the game and posted my score, and now the game pops-up each day in my browser and has become part of my daily routine.
That’s the real kicker. Routine is what keeps us hooked. When we always stop for a coffee on the way to work we turn Starbucks into a dominant brand. When our evening routine involves Fortnite, we also start lining the pockets of the game developer.
I’m a creature of routine, not just habit. (In fact, I recently wrote a book about it.) On social media, I always flip through my feeds each morning just to see if there is anything interesting. Guess what? Facebook is raking in the cash because so many of us do that every day. You could argue that when something becomes a routine, from buying a soda to watching Netflix, it creates an empire. Massive corporations emerge once we also start using their products on a routine basis, not just occasionally.
And, it’s fun to watch. I hope Wordle can expand into a vast gaming empire. For now, it’s just a simple puzzle game that has attracted millions.
