I made my own Wordle last night.
It doesn’t quite match the original’s aesthetic, and it’s missing a few features. The word is different every time anyone plays, so users can’t gather to complain that today’s word was SPELT or RIMED. There’s no social-sharing feature. There’s no Wordlebot. The list of words is the original one Josh Wardle used, not the one Tracy Bennett’s been editing. (She probably wouldn’t let RIMED in there: it’s a little old-fashioned for the NYT’s taste.)
Even so…it’s a Wordle. What else would it be? In fact, let’s be brasher: it’s a wordle. Just like I take an aspirin (not an Aspirin(TM)) and look at crossword xeroxes (not Xeroxes(TM)).
I’m hardly a computing genius (does anybody know how to convert interactive SWF files? Everything I’ve tried so far flattens them to one-second videos). So the fact that I could do this just by following these 2022 instructions by Taq Karim says something about how simple wordles are.
In days to come, I might try more customizations. I’m intrigued by Hollywood Wordle, a variation that uses movie titles. (Today’s answer was a film title that was not a dictionary word.) I might try an edited word list to do something similar for movies, or songs, or comics characters.
Am I doing this as a form of protest? Yeah, a little. I doubt it’ll attract much notice, and I’m labeling it as “not Wordle.” But I know from experience that I tend to regret the stands I don’t take out of fear more than the ones I do. So, within reason, I’ll let contrarianism inspire me.
I’d also like to investigate other designers’ home-brewed variations. I’ve mentioned I get a kick out of Waffle and CineNerdle, but those are arguably not wordles—the only Wordle-like things about them are their names and colors. For a while, I also enjoyed Phrazle, a wordle that used phrases, and Sedecordle, a game that let you solve sixteen wordles at once. (As seen below, Phrazle adds a little bit to Wordle’s color scheme, using green for “right letter, right space,” orange for “right letter, right word, wrong space,” and purple for “right letter, wrong word.”)
There are other variants I could explore, and it seems like a good idea to do that this year. After all, more of them may be going away soon.
When we started exploring this topic, I said I could sometimes enjoy good art even if I didn’t always like the actions of the artist or publisher. But sometimes backstage knowledge makes the art itself look flatter.
Here’s the dirty little secret about Wordle: it’s almost too simple. Like straightforward sudoku, you can set it up with only a little know-how and then run it on automatic for years. Basically, that’s what Josh Wardle did with the original version. No disrespect to Tracy Bennett, but I often can’t see the hand of human authorship in individual Wordle installments.
That “death of the author” sets it apart from other NYT puzzles like Connections and Strands—and, of course, the crossword. The NYT Crossword has no need to attack its rivals through the law when it can outshine them just by being itself. Its voice isn’t something others can copy without direct plagiarism. (Or possibly AI-based mimicry, but we’re still a year or three away from that issue.)
Wordle is copyable, and such reproducibility may be some motive for the takedown notices. But as a result, those notices seem less a show of strength than a show of weakness. And not just business weakness, but creative weakness.
The more I think about stuff like this, the more I find my enthusiasm for NYT’s Wordle has dulled. Connections, Strands, the wordle variants? No issues there. (You can expect more material on those in April.) Wordle? Eh.
So I’m taking it off my rotation.
I’m not going to swear it off entirely. If my friends mention an interesting answer to me, I’ll play. (Yesterday, the answer turned out to be the name of my Aunt SALLY, so the chance for family fun took precedence over my issues.)
But as editor of The Journal of Wordplay, I’m more interested in watching Wordle’s footprint than its daily installments. At the end of the year if not before, I’ll be doing a follow-up on this piece, with notes about which wordles and wordle-related features could be found in 2024—and which were scared away. I’ll also be putting a version of this piece in the next issue, supplemented with more interview content and independent study.
A big part of the NYT’s journalistic reputation hinges on holding the powerful to account. But now and then, someone needs to hold its people to account—even when the stakes seem low.
Tomorrow: An oddly relevant micross!
I'll save a further discussion of your trademark paragraph for some time I can find you in person...