They are all there playing Wordle to the point that yesterday when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s mess exploded – I’m referring to the clandestine party in Downing Street garden in full lockdown – the airline Ryanair tweeted his mystery word of the day, RULES, rules. The ones that BoJo broke. I don’t know how long this fashion will last, a few years ago there was another pun that seemed irresistible and then it disappeared, it was called Ruzzle and it was an app.
The beauty of Wordle is also the story behind it: a game created for love during the pandemic by a Brooklyn engineer, Josh Wardle, for his girlfriend, Palak Shah. First she played it, then the relatives, finally the friends and now it seems that everyone wants to play it, even if it is in English, it is based on a vocabulary of about twelve thousand English words from which Palak herself would have extracted the first two thousand (which considering the limit of one word per day, will be enough for the next five years at least).
But is it fair to say that the engineer in love with Brooklyn invented this game? Wordle is actually a very ancient play on words, Tiberio Timperi already did it on his TV debut in 1992 (Lingo, it was the program), and then in similar forms, Mike Bongiorno and Giancarlo Magalli. The skill of the Brooklyn engineer was in bringing it online with the right graphics and rules, making it a space that seems out of time, out of the web as we know it: it’s free, has no advertising, doesn’t profile you and after you have after your attempt is over, about five minutes, it sends you back to the next day because being too online is not good for you. Isn’t that wonderful?
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