“There were a couple of things wrong with it. “I built a prototype of Wordle in, like, 2013,” Wardle says. And it seemed the most interesting aspect of what he was doing. 31) was actually costing Wardle money, the roughly $100 a month required to keep it online. Far from producing income, the game (at least until Jan.
You can play only once a day, and that play benefits only you, or whoever you want to talk about it with. It went out into the larger world almost as a whim, without any of the things that could generate money-like ads, or “push” notifications to encourage you to hurry back or linger. It was fashioned for an audience of one: his partner, Palak Shah, because she likes word games. While at Reddit, he created a couple of projects that, by inviting people to take part in something entirely new, doubled as case studies in a question that lately pre-occupies much of the world: How does the design of a site steer the behavior of the people coming to it? He grew up on an organic livestock farm in southern Wales, and came to the States for an MFA in digital art at the University of Oregon, then found work in Silicon Valley. “My inbox is destroyed,” Wardle said slowly, staring through the windshield. “I think if I was actually the creator,” the Canadian Josh Wardle observed to a reporter, “I’d be quite exhausted.” 22 Saturday Night Live featured an impersonation of former President Donald Trump playing Wordle.īut when we met, Wardle had not wanted his photo taken, and was clearly worn down by the attention tsunami that a few days earlier had swept across the Great Plains to engulf a Canadian industrial equipment salesman with the same name: “Regina man mistaken for inventor of Wordle fielding flood of emails, CNN interview request” was the headline on a CBC story. During the month of January, the number swelled beyond 10 million, that kind of acceleration that creates its own weather.
By the end of December, there were 300,000. One way to measure the popularity of Wordle is the number of people playing it each day. “I made something,” he explained, “that I would like to exist on the internet.” In fact, much of the conversation was about how his invention-a simple game that gives a player six chances to guess a five-letter word-demonstrated that the internet could be about something other than money. In the front seat of a running car the the day before (we were to talk in a park, but it was 25° F) Wardle had betrayed no hint of any impending windfall.