Wordle World

If you still haven’t heard of or started playing Wordle, you are probably between 18-35, certainly not reading this blog and the main reason why Microsoft bought Activision for $70 Bn and why Facebook lost over $200 Bn in market cap last week. You are the future, in terms of eyeballs and wallet sizes, and so the flavour of the month for every Bezos, Gates and Zuckerberg out there.  On the other hand, if the prospect of seeing 5 squares light up in green results in extreme dopamine release, you have likely completed at least 2 score and more years, with more than a few scars to show for it. Your reward for this is to be well and truly part of the wondrous world of Wordle, the veracity of which is vindicated by the venerable NYT acquiring this viral game for a very worthy amount indeed. Now that that difficult sentence of v’s and w’s has been completed, let’s move on and seek to find reasons as to why Wordle players have started behaving like teenagers attending a rock concert for the first time.

 

For those of us with gray in our hair or what’s left of it, the prospect of staying relevant in the Metaverse is akin to the dread we feared during Grade 10 and 12 exams. Having come of age watching MTV and Channel V on magical cable, and then successfully riding the WWW and mobile waves during our salad days, we have been used to being the teachers of tech to those both older and younger than us. The seniors would be happy to absorb our tidbits of techno-geek, while the juniors were literally in their diapers with no iPad for distraction. So the start of the millennium was literally our own dawn, when we were the masters of tech who worshipped at the altar of Google, Facebook and Amazon.

 

The thing with technology, though, is that it knows no boundaries. It is like an eternal adolescent with raging hormones, going in all directions without any plan, driven only by a desire to be different and do something unique. It doesn’t have a rear-view mirror and doesn’t care that those hitherto in the driver’s seat are now in the back, pulverized into submission by the sheer speed at which it moves, with aging dendrites struggling to absorb the difference between AR and VR, to figure out whether Crypto is the latest horror movie or something else, and what’s really the difference between AI and Air India. 

 

Redemption has arrived for those of us in the slow lane in the form of this simple word game, which requires some grey matter but doesn’t give us a migraine when we exert those remaining cells. It evokes childhood memories and allows for nostalgic glimpses, when words like “knoll” harken to the days of Enid Blyton and visualising sandwiches being eaten atop the hill in the countryside.   It is the teacher we fondly remember, challenging us with the first 2 tries, but relenting on the 3^rd and 4^th after seeing the effort put in and giving us a pat on the back. And lest we forget that technology is inter-woven into life’s daily fabric, it allows us to brag a bit by sharing our results, especially when we’ve been lucky and solved it in fewer attempts than friends, family and most importantly ex-classmates, with whom the competitive spirit shall never ebb. So thank you Wordle for allowing us to feel relevant, to be grateful that the days devouring books were not a waste of time and to acknowledge that while we may not be the Masters of the Universe as once we thought we were, we can still survive in the Metaverse.