InQ.IFBA Portal da Inovação & Qualidade
By Giselle Muniz
Since the end of 2021, the Internet has been filled with daily sharing an online game called “Wordle”. The Internet user’s favorite has already garnered itself a lot of attention, including the American newspaper New York Times (NYT), which officially bought the game in January of this year, attracting more than 3 million users in less than 90 days.
The original invention consists of a free web-based word game developed by Josh Wardle, a programmer who previously created the social experiments Place and The Button for Reddit. The intention is that one tries to guess a five-letter English word daily, in a maximum of six attempts; the player receives feedback after each attempt, in the form of colored pieces, telling players which letters are in the correct position and which are in other positions of the answer-word.
However, the story did not end with Wordle, which now has derivations by other programmers for several languages, as Portuguese, where the prominent games currently are ” Term.oo, Letreco and Charada”. At this point, there are approximately 222 versions of the game in 79 languages. The innovation in this game reveals that the principles of simplicity and functionality can never be put aside, since there is not much secret to the game, it is really to activate the vocabulary and put the mind to think. The application has inspired many new platforms, which have a similar structure, but present different themes, such as mathematical equations, discovering countries from the shape of the map, songs from album covers, and also applications identical to the original, with certain themes, such as animals and feelings.
It becomes possible to list the characteristics of the games that have made them so successful in a short time. Thinking about it, Francisco Tupy, in his article published in Prensa, presented some points that demonstrates clear elements of an ideal state of gameplay, present in Wordle: the rules are clear to understand, the victory conditions express more than one form of interaction, the sharing of social networks; success brings a sense of victory and defeat is encouraging; sense of continuity, with an anti bore dose. He also added analysis on the purchase of the game by the NYT, which seeks a media and technological adaptation of the virtual newspaper, that in association with the reading of the physical newspaper always accompanied by crossword puzzles, the game in the midst of the news adapts a new construction and structure being formed in the main communication vehicles.
