Wordle was created in October of last year and has since become an undeniable and unexpected global sensation. From its popularity on Twitter to its acquisition by The New York Times Company, it has been drastically depopulated since January, to the point of persuading developers all over the globe to join the "trend" by creating "their own copies" of Wordle.
And, as was the case with Doom and the earliest first-person shooters, generic prototermines were employed to describe them before settling on a name that characterized them. You know what to anticipate if you know he looks like Doom. As a result, the "dle" at the end of Wordle was a success, spawning hundreds upon dozens of clones. There's one with just curse words, one in German, one with only keywords relating to the Lord of the Rings or Taylor Swift, and so on. Then there were the experiments and the games that took up the premise but mixed it with other previously existing and well-known puzzles, and so on.
We are really seeing something extremely rare: the emergence of a new sub-genre of video games that makes full use of previously recognized structures and concepts while leveraging the momentum of Wordle's popularity to give free freedom to creativity. It is not uncommon for certain games to be so successful that they inspire the development of several clones (just think of Candy Crush, Flappy Bird, Angry Birds, Slender or the never quite hated 2048). Most of these games, however, have spawned an almost unlimited number of clones that have flooded the market, digital shops, and online applications, but have seldom resulted in the establishment of a new genre in its own right.
When does a genre emerge? When the features underlying the interactive aspects become so particular, obvious, and distinct from the original game that they may be borrowed into games with radically different architectures while retaining a certain fil rouge. Wordle with curse words is really a Wordle clone, just as all Flappy Bird clones and 2048 were merely clones of those games. Other games that have been produced in recent months/weeks, beginning with Wordle, have little in common with that if not the notion that got them a fortune.
But what precisely made Wordle the game it is, with all of its success? After all, in terms of mechanics, it isn't really unique. Lingo, a nearly similar television game, already existed in 1987 and had generated a fortune all over the globe, while a paper counterpart known as Jotto dated back to the 1950s. Without going too far, Mastermind's core method, in which an element existing in the key and put in the correct location is recognized with one color and an element present in the key but placed in a different location is identified with another color, has proved effective. eBulls and Cows (the original notion of this type of game) certainly dates back to the twentieth century and has been played almost across the civilized world for the last sixty years.
I've already said that true innovation does not exist in the end, and it surely cannot be found in any successful product. Each time, it is the result of countless processes that add information, one after the other, to something else. Nonetheless, Mastermind has become a global success. Lingo has achieved international acclaim. And Wordle is so popular that it requires one more step.
Wordle and its forerunners
How do you play Wordle? Simple and straightforward rules, readily understood by all: six guesses of a five-letter word with entire meaning. The letter and location hints assist you in determining which choices to exclude. Wordle is so simple to use that it's no surprise that so many people use it or have tried it.
Wordle does not appeal to me. He has absolutely nothing wrong with him, yet he's not for me. As a puzzler, I always thought he lacked depth and strategy: well, there are certain "pleasant" terms to begin with, but the player is ultimately limited to his understanding of the language and vocabulary. In other words, it expressly needs the player to have knowledge outside of the game.
Redactle
However, the game that I fell in love with is also what inspired me to create this blog. If I believe it exists because Wordle gained a fortune at the end of last year, I nearly don't believe it, but Redactle Unlimited, or preferably its Italian counterpart Redattolo, is simply a gem that occupies 40-50 minutes of my day, every day, since days. And it will very certainly continue to do so.
An utterly random and nearly fully filtered Wikipedia entry (apart from articles and prepositions). The aim is straightforward: discover the article's title in the fewest number of trials, with the greatest accuracy, while disclosing the least amount of the content feasible. Why do I like Redattolo so much? Because it deepens the notion of attempting and approaching the answer via encrypted clues: solving Redattoloit entails attempting to comprehend the lexical domain of the article, the topic, and key terms, and then progressively succeeding in framing the solution. Which is never the whole article, but rather a very short, very basic word amid the hundreds and hundreds of words of Wikipedia.
