wordle game is sweeping the United States
Wordle has attracted the attention of a large number of social network users, and has been widely popular in recent weeks, and is based on the simple principle of discovering a word every day of 5 letters, in a maximum of 6 attempts.
Susan Drobin, who plays "Wardle" daily, said it was "fantastic", and noted in a statement to "AFP" that it makes the player "addicted to it."
The game "only takes a few minutes", explains the retired woman who lives in Maryland on the east coast of the United States, describing it as a "cute and short-lived pastime".
The New York Times reported that the number of people trying to find the word for the day rose from 90 on 1 November to more than 300,000 two months later, on 2 January.
The principle of the game seems easy, to find the most suitable word of 5 letters, in a maximum of 6 attempts.
Each letter appears in its correct place in green, and if the letter is not in its place appears in yellow.
Each player must find one word per day, the same for everyone, and if he fails to do so, he can only try again the next day.
Susan Drobin, who started playing weeks ago, joined thousands of Wordle enthusiasts who publish their daily results on social media using the #Wordle hashtag, in the form of 6 lines, each containing 5 colored squares, showing the number of attempts made by the player to decipher the puzzle.
No ads
What distinguishes Wardle is that its designer, a British computer engineer named Josh Wardle who lives in New York, did not intend to sell it to the general public, but simply wanted it as a means of entertainment, and decided not to make profits through this game.
Users "enjoy this fun online game," Josh Wardle told the New York Times.
He reassured that "Wordle" does not "do anything suspicious of the player's personal data", and that no ads appear on the site, but some people have previously tried to copy the principle, and make money through it.
The original game can be found at powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle.
Michael Jacobson, research coordinator at the Game Lab Center for Digital Games Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said that Word helps pass time, as in "waiting for the bus" cases, for example.
Online brag
And Jacobson said in an interview with AFP that the success of the game is partly due to the ease with which the player publishes his results on social networks.
"You feel proud (after solving the puzzle), and you just click on the little share button to let you show off a little bit, which is what we usually like to do," he said.
As for the psychologist specializing in video games, Rachel Quert, she believed that the matter falls under the theory of social comparison, as each individual wants to evaluate himself compared to others. "Limiting the possibility of playing to once a day gives a feeling of psychological scarcity," she told AFP, "This is what makes you want to come back and play day after day."
The game has another advantage that it is accessible to everyone, provided that the user is fluent in the English language, but this condition no longer exists, and soon copies of it were available in other languages, given its wide popularity.
Motos became Sotom.
"Wordel" was finally converted into French and renamed "Sotom", a name composed of the letters of the word "Motos" in reverse, and "Motos" a well-known television game that was shown on the channels of the public group "France TV".
On the sutom.nocle.fr site, the user should, as in “Wordell”, find the word of the day in only 6 attempts, but Jonathan Magano, who took over the task of converting “Wordell” to “Sutom”, explained to AFP that he did not want to use all the peculiarities of the English version .
A 30-year-old computer engineer designed Sotom in one day. Just 4 days after the game's launch, positive results began to appear on the Sotom website, and the number of players' tweets of their results quickly increased from 488 on Monday to about 1300 on Tuesday afternoon, and the rope was on the tractor.