Wordle: Why I Walked
By Tania Zamorsky
Are people still playing Wordle?
I wouldn’t begrudge anyone that — especially these days, when stress relief is still so sorely needed. But while I used to play obsessively, at some point, for me personally, one aspect of the game began to curdle. I have not played in several months.
It wasn’t because the The New York Times had recently and smartly gobbled up the popular game. While I found f&%*$&g annoying, if true, the paper’s reportedly phasing out curse words from their dictionary, and had heard unconfirmed grumblings that the words had gotten much harder, those weren’t the reasons I stopped playing either.
My discontent stemmed from the phenomena of users proudly sharing their scores on social media — it seemed sometimes, daily — via a conveniently generated graphic that verified the specific game they played and how they fared, without revealing either their guesses or the ultimate answer.
Don’t get it twisted: I proudly shared to my social media network an early 2/5. (This was followed by a streak of 4/5s and even one 5/5, which of course I shared with no one.) But at a certain point, I stopped posting my results, because it came to feel disingenuous, and possibly even dangerous, to pretend that we were all playing the same game.
Do real or virtual watercooler conversations still abound, in which players compare and share their preferred first word selections? These choices revealed who we voted for (BIDEN or TRUMP), or otherwise illustrated our cleverness — that is, until numerous articles appeared, giving us algorithmically optimized first-word entries. Granted, we were now statistically more likely to guess correctly, but where was the fun or sportsmanship in that?
Don’t get it twisted: I proudly shared to my social media network an early 2/5. (This was followed by a streak of 4/5s and even one 5/5, which of course I shared with no one.) But at a certain point, I stopped posting my results, because it came to feel disingenuous, and possibly even dangerous, to pretend that we were all playing the same game.
In the game’s infancy, one well-known writer proclaimed on Twitter that all of her first word guesses henceforth would be PENIS. While she may have been kidding, I’d like to think she stuck with that one on principle. I started a recent game with it, and the Gray Lady not only still allowed it, but graciously awarded me two gold squares.
But something increasingly nagged at me. I thought about how, when one’s entry (to the game of life, that is) is based either on access to certain advantages, or sheer luck, which helps them to ‘game the game,’ the ultimate result has arguably little to do with them — their skill and hard work, their hearts and smarts.
And that’s fine! Or, at any rate, that’s life. Unless, that is, people pretend otherwise, that is, that they are completely (or, worse, smugly) ‘self-made.’
Look, I feel guilty for dragging my beloved Wordle into all this — or at least a bit like Rachel Dratch’s Debbie Downer character on SNL (Cue the “Whomp whomp…”), and I do often miss playing. When I started to feel this way, I had just finished watching the winter Olympics in Beijing and what I was really craving, I think, was a Worldle where all players get the same starting line, a level playing field and therefore the same chance of ‘getting to green’ (the game’s version of the gold).
Anything else had started to feel to me like a first row with five grays in it, where play was still technically possible — but (without one of these aforementioned performance enhancers) likely not the podium.
In the meantime, I will continue to brag —I maintain, justifiably — if and when I ever manage to finish the Sunday NYT crossword puzzle, which still kindly offers the same underlying clues to everyone.
Tania Zamorsky is a writer and PR professional based in New York— who, despite being “one prone to idol thoughts,” wonders if you know of a 14-letter phrase describing same.
