One year of Wordle-domination: what keeps us coming back to the game day after day?

It's been a year since the New York Times bought Wordle. Writer and game developer David Shariatmadari joined Elamin Abdelmahmoud to look back on the game's success, as well as talk about his own experience creating a new brain teaser for word sleuths. 

Below is an excerpt from their conversation; for the full discussion, check out the Commotion podcast on CBC Listen, Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

Elamin: You spent a lot of time looking at Wordle trying to figure out, why is this thing so popular? What did you end up finding out?

David: I think there are several ingredients. Experts I talked to said again and again that the shareability of it is really important — the widget that we see on social media, that was actually created by a fan and then kind of integrated into the game by Josh Wardle... You see the little coloured squares, so it doesn't give away the answer, but it shows you how well it did. That was very important.

The other, maybe the singular thing in its favour was the fact that there's only one puzzle a day. Everyone gets the same one. So what it kind of does, it sort of gives us that collective experience, which so much of the Internet doesn't really provide. I mean, back in the day when TV shows were broadcast once a week, people would have that kind of collective experience, and Wordle kind of brought that back into our lives. And I think that was a weird kind of retro novelty.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.