How a bet spoiled Wordle for me

It was a simple proposal my friend shared, the day after I introduced Wordle to him and others in our WhatsApp group: “Wanna bet who can solve quicker tomorrow? 1 beer.”

 It was just a way to make the viral word game more challenging and, if it were any other game, I wouldn’t have hesitated at all. Yet, with Wordle, I felt like I was about to commit some act of indiscretion.

 Why? Because Wordle, in its design and spirit, prioritised fun over any consideration of opportunism, however friendly and benign.

Wordle was designed by Josh Wardle, a software engineer who was also behind the Reddit games The Button and Place. In his latest project, you have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. 

Every time you enter a word, you get hints of how close you are. A letter lit yellow indicates that it is part of the puzzle but in the wrong place, while a letter in green indicates that it is part of the puzzle and is exactly where it should be. A grey letter means it is absent from the word you’re trying to guess.

The game mechanics are intuitive and create just the right amount of challenge to have mass appeal, amounting to millions around the world. The more competitive lot can aim to solve the puzzle in as few tries as possible, while the rest may do the same but take greater satisfaction from the breezy gameplay.

 The sense of ease you get from playing Wordle is accentuated by its low barriers to entry. All you have to do to play is go to the game’s browser address, read the brief instructional text and, well, begin. There are no ads or email sign-up notifications to draw your attention away from the puzzle at hand.

 So what’s the big deal in amping up the challenge factor by including a bet among friends?

For me, at least, it had to do with the terms of play. Only one puzzle is released on the Wordle site each day, meaning after your six tries, over a few to 10 minutes, you close your browser and carry on with your day.

The game, by design, precludes compulsive playing. With the bet, though, I ended up adding stress—the pressure to win a beer or, to put this in another way, the pressure not to lose out—to the game.

The day the Wordle bet came into play, I was so conscious of making all my chances count, I took three tries over half an hour to solve “Shire”.

Wardle started Wordle as a gift for his wife who loved word games. After he shared it with family members and received enthusiastic responses, though, he put it up for public play in October, 2021. Slowly, it caught on, before exploding in popularity in 2022. 

Even after becoming a social media phenomenon and being covered by multiple news outlets, all without the help of app- or ad-driven growth, Wardle indicated that he wanted the game to be free to play. 

He told the BBC in early January, “I don’t understand why something can’t just be fun. I don’t have to charge people money for this and ideally would like to keep it that way.” The spirit of the game, in other words, is meant to be generous and inviting.

It’s not surprising, then, that fans of Wordle use value-laden terms like “pure” and “unalloyed” when describing the daily word game. Hence, their concern when the New York Times announced in late January that it had bought Wordle for a seven-figure sum.

The New York Times said the game “would initially remain free to new and existing players”. For now, players can enjoy Wordle in all its fuss-free glory.

It’s also not surprising, given Wordle’s innocuousness, how quick players were to chastise opportunists who copied Wordle and turned it into paid apps, which Apple eventually took down from its app store.

The copycats have defended their decision by saying that Wordle itself is similar to Lingo, a 1980s Netherlands quiz game show. It might well be that this is a coincidence and game designers, of course, borrow ideas from different people and places.

But even without considering how original Wordle is, the goodwill it’s generated and the way this has spread around the world, undoubtedly, are unique to Wardle’s creation and the affordances described earlier. 

In a nod to the special place Wordle occupies in people’s hearts, the New York Times made sure to mention that no changes will be made to its gameplay after its acquisition. 

What has all this to do with my beer bet? Undoubtedly, the bet is not at all as crass as what the copycats have done and was waged in the spirit of friendly one-upmanship.

The stakes weren’t high either, unlike the US$30 annual subscription rate the opportunistic entrepreneur Zach Shakked was planning to charge for a premium-tiered version of his Wordle clone app.

Nevertheless, the bet does show, in miniature form, how an inclusion of something material, beyond the original intention of the game, can change the norms of playing it.

With the beer bet, the fun factor of the game vied with the prospect of winning a tangible reward in my mind. I wasn’t out to gain thousands or millions of dollars, but I was still out to achieve something beyond just the thrill of guessing the word of the day.

Take that logic further, up the utilitarian quotient multifold, and the game, as a joyful way to pass the time, depreciates more and more. To the point where the values it is predicated on make no impression on you.  

I am not suggesting that games should never be monetised. Playlogue would not exist that way, after all.

Games, however, should be considered on the terms of their conception and development. Wardle began the game as a gift and a way to bring joy to others.

In following this precept, though, there can be fair ways of giving your own spin to Wordle, even without the kind of buying power the New York Times has. For instance, Lewdle and Sweardle, which respectively make you guess dirty words and cuss words, are free to play and clearly intended to be tributes to the original game.

People have also created free versions of the game in different languages, including Malay, Chinese, and Tamil.

I was glad to find, when I went to the office the same week I made the beer bet, that I was not the only one who was taking the spirit of Wordle seriously. Perhaps even to the point of obsession.

When Hazel was playing the game and found our colleagues Iris, Natasha and Key discussing their individual clues to solve the puzzle together, she got off her seat and briskly left the room. 

She wanted to decipher the clues based on her own guesses, as Wordle was designed for. She wanted to play Wordle on the terms of the game. (This should really be the only way, Iris, Natasha and Key. No offence. Okay, maybe some offence.)

For what it’s worth, I ended up winning the beer bet that day and told my friends that the wager was making Wordle less fun for me.

We decided we’d make one last bet before reverting to normal Wordle. The friend who owed me a beer that day ended up on top the next day. I was last and owed him a beer.

In the end, our wins and losses cancelled each other out. We were in equilibrium again.

I could, to use a five-letter word, relax.

If you enjoyed Wordle and are looking for more word and guessing games, go here.