I just saw him start posting his results. Holliday: My partner started playing after me, and we didn’t talk about it. It feels like I want them to share it because I get something. And so originally I had a link, but when you share it on Twitter, it tries to show a big preview of the thing. If your goal is growth, then you should definitely include a link to your thing. Not including a link was, again, one of those things that’s the opposite of what you’re meant to do. And obviously that’s had a huge impact in helping it go viral. So I’m like, I can make this, I can just pull this into the game. So I saw other people start doing it and then manually typing out the emoji grid, going back and forth and referencing it. (There are slight spoilers if you really want to be pedantic about it, but not really.) Previously, people were just saying, “Wordle in three,” and then she added this visual component that tells a story. And for some reason that I don’t fully understand, the game got big in New Zealand, and New Zealand Twitter was playing a lot of the game, and someone out there who I don’t know-she’s called Elizabeth S, and I only know her on Twitter-came up with the emoji grid as a spoiler-free way of sharing her results with other people. Wordle, as I built it, got picked up in a New York Times newsletter, and people started playing it, and there was no share grid. The first thing I have to point out is that I did not come up with the emoji grid. Did you design it that way to give the game a mysterious element and intrigue people, or what’s the idea behind that? And then the yellow and green emoji squares. And there wasn’t a hashtag or URL, just the name Wordle with a score. And I was like, “What are these mystery squares?” in December. It happened very early for me because I know a lot of linguists, and linguists were very excited about this. When I first started seeing the colored boxes showing in people’s Twitter feeds, I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
Holliday: Another key to Wordle success online has been the ability to share results. You can only play Wordle once a day and it’s the same word for everyone. As soon as you finish one puzzle, you could move on to the next one, which Wordle doesn’t do. Some of the big differences were it was endless play. I’d actually created a prototype of it back in 2013, and the mechanics were the same. But yeah, I wanted to try making a game that she and I would enjoy playing together, and Wordle was a result of that. It’s a bit too much for me, to be honest. Holliday: Oh, we’re big fans of Spelling Bee here. She and I got really into the New York Times crossword, and she plays a lot of Spelling Bee as well. Josh Wardle: The goal with Wordle actually was to create a word game for my partner to play. What inspired you to create this game? Was it just a pandemic project, like so many of us have been dabbling in these days? What happened? Nicole Holliday: So, Josh, you’re an artist, product manager, and engineer who’s worked at Reddit among other places.
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