Why You Can’t Resist Wordle

Metadata
Highlights
- Nguyen described this as a process of “agency expansion.” Thus a Wordle grid serves as a record of the player’s agency, tracking the conditions she faced and the decisions she made as she played the game.
- Nguyen wrote that the game is “a triumph of social graphic design.” He told me, “I can’t take in a chess-game description at a glance, but I can glance down a feed and see a bunch of my friends’ grids and know what happened.”
- Stephen Stallings, a music supervisor in New York who started a TikTok account to document his Wordle plays, described it as an “Internet version of water cooler talk.”
- After childhood, we rarely have to think about how a single letter change can cause a vast difference in a word’s meaning, or about just how many possibilities exist within five letters. Games like Wordle bring back a little bit of the wonder.
Why You Can’t Resist Wordle

Metadata
Highlights
- Nguyen described this as a process of “agency expansion.” Thus a Wordle grid serves as a record of the player’s agency, tracking the conditions she faced and the decisions she made as she played the game.
- Nguyen wrote that the game is “a triumph of social graphic design.” He told me, “I can’t take in a chess-game description at a glance, but I can glance down a feed and see a bunch of my friends’ grids and know what happened.”
- Stephen Stallings, a music supervisor in New York who started a TikTok account to document his Wordle plays, described it as an “Internet version of water cooler talk.”
- After childhood, we rarely have to think about how a single letter change can cause a vast difference in a word’s meaning, or about just how many possibilities exist within five letters. Games like Wordle bring back a little bit of the wonder.