Phewdle!

– image from Harvard University 

When I used to fly every week, I would play those back-of-the-seat trivia games offered on the little screens on some planes. You get a question, and you choose from four answers. The first time I did it, I slowly realized that I was actually playing against other passengers, identified—as was I—by seat number. 

Who the hell is 14D? Why does 24C know everything there is to know about sports? I would surreptitiously meander down the aisle to see who I was up against. Once, a man said, “are you 18a?” as I passed by his row. He and I were top contenders during the long flight from North Carolina to Seattle. We started celebrating each others’ wins and ended with a handshake as we deplaned.

So it might come as no surprise that I have been fully onboard with Wordle, the satisfyingly simple word game created by a man for his partner because she loves word games. The beauty of it is its renegade nature. No ads, no upsells, no fancy app, and you can only play it once a day, so it doesn’t take over your life. And I love that everyone on the planet who is playing gets the same six chances a day to solve the game and the whole planet is solving for the same word, but spoilers are virtually nonexistent. That, alone, is remarkable. A social contract that works!

There is something so, so sweet about all of that. Emma and I compare scores every day. People post their scores on Twitter and Facebook, congratulating each other, lamenting the hard ones, without ever giving away the answer. The ones that take all six tries, I call “phewdles.” Do you know how rare such an innocent global phenomenon this all is?

Then came the news that the NYTimes had bought Wordle. I am so glad for its inventor’s big, unexpected payday. He made something for love and was rewarded for it. And alongside that happiness for him is a sense of disappointment that this renegade pleasure—outside the mainstream and without commercial underpinnings—suddenly would be commodified. 

Is that necessarily the way of the world? More, bigger, better?

What about less, smaller, good enough? That’s my direction of intention. 

Less stuff.

Smaller chunks of my time sold for a paycheck. 

Good enough rather than perfect. 

And holding up my end of the social contract, daily. 

*phewdle*