To cope with the stressors of his job as an intensive care doctor in Scarborough, Joshua Landy has found a new morning ritual.
It involves picking up your phone and typing “Wordle” in your search bar. Almost immediately, 30 square boxes appear, five across and six below. So Landy, along with 2.7 million people around the world, tries to guess the five-letter word of the day in six tries.
“I take a break every morning and do the puzzle using the funniest words I can think of,” the ICU doctor said. “So all my friends make fun of each other for wasting guesswork in our group chat.
“It’s nice to do something that feels normal for five minutes,” said Landy, who has played the game every morning for the past 10 days.
As the world deals with another wave of COVID-19 fueled by the Omicron variant, Wordle has become a fixture in the lives of millions almost overnight. The word game, created by Josh Wardle, a software engineer based in Brooklyn, as a gift for his partner, it was pretty dark when it was released in October. Now, it is one of the most popular games of the day.
The game is simple: all players have to guess the same five-letter word in six tries. After each answer, the tiles turn gray to show which letters are not in the word, yellow for letters that are in the word but in the wrong position, and green for letters that are in the correct space. Players have one day to solve the puzzle before the game resets with a new word.
Its meteoric rise is due in no small part to social media, where players post their scores in the form of yellow, green, and gray square emojis. It has also become something that people look forward to every morning, at a time when the end of the pandemic seems nowhere near.
“It’s just relaxing, and you know what you’re going to get,” said Crystal Sales, a Toronto-based director of ad strategy who has been working from home for most of the pandemic. Sales said he plays Wordle every morning after getting his coffee and helping his son log into virtual school.
“Instead of opening Apple News or Instagram, I just play Wordle and there’s nothing else to distract me.”
Like many drawn to the game, Sales found out about Wordle when he saw the pictures on his Twitter feed. Now even her workplace has a dedicated Slack channel to discuss the word of the day every morning. For Sales, Wordle has also become a fun and stress-free way to socialize with colleagues across Canada while working from home.
Kathy McPherson, a Toronto woman who also works from home, said the appeal of Wordle is that it’s difficult enough to be challenging, yet simple enough not to be frustrating. “It gives you a little kick when you get it,” he said, adding that the fact that it only allows you to play once a day makes it that much more special.
“It’s a better thing to do than just sit around (on Twitter) and see what bad news there is,” McPherson said. “It’s a more fun way to start the day.”
Whether the hype around Wordle is here to stay remains to be seen. McPherson said that, for her, the game is similar to previous trends that came and went during the quarantine, such as baking bread, binge-watching “Tiger King” or doing tie-dye crafts.
“There are all kinds of different things that people learn to keep themselves busy and not think about the terrible news,” McPherson said.
Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at Western University, said he’s a fan of the game but tends to agree it could just be a phase.
“At a time when people are feeling the impact of the pandemic on their mental health, they are likely to be looking for a little bit of relief from time to time,” Owen said. “We’ve all tried to have fun in many different ways, and anything new and exciting is going to tend to get more attention than anything that’s been around for a while.”
“It’s kind of a perfect storm,” he added. “It’s short, it’s simple to do, and it engages the brain in a way that feels more constructive than sitting in front of the TV, and it also has this social element.”
Whether Wordle will survive other pandemic trends remains to be seen. But for now, the game has sparked joy at a time when so many need it.
“It’s refreshing and enjoyable, as banal as it sounds,” Owen said. “It’s refreshing for people to have something positive to post on their Twitter account in the morning.”
Reference-www.thestar.com