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Josh Wardle got a very nice round of applause at the Game Developers Conference for saying that he designed Wordle without thinking about monetization. He also created something all too rare during the pandemic: a room full of game developers laughing and smiling.
Wordle is one of the rare thrills of gaming as it was built by a single developer and played by millions of people since Wardle made it public in October 2021. The title didn’t monetize, but it went viral after Wardle released it possible to share daily results as emoji squares on Twitter.
Plenty of clones have appeared on mobile stores to steal some of Wordle’s thunder, but Wardle was able to cash in on a seven-figure payment when The New York Times Company bought Wordle in January. Not bad for a software engineer and artist who made the game for his partner. It was one of the fairy tales of the game industry, like the stories of the creation of games like Flappy Bird, Threes, Stardew Valley and more.
“I see myself as an artist. Running things isn’t interesting to me,” he said. “But the flip side of this is that I didn’t want to make money from the game. Other people are fine with making money from the game. I didn’t want to make money from the game. This is probably the best possible outcome.”
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Wardle sparked jealousy for making the art of making a successful video game seem so effortless. He is a rarity as he considered himself an artist and not a game developer at all.
“I don’t see myself as a game developer at all,” Wardle said. “I would like to be honest about that. Maybe what I’m sharing with you here is totally naive, but I just want to share what my experience was.”
I walked an average of 15,000 steps a day in the GDC in San Francisco this week looking for these kinds of stories. Amid the terrifying gloom of the pandemic and war in Ukraine — which has endangered 30,000 or more game developers, some of whom I know personally — it hasn’t been easy to find inspiring stories lately. But I was happy to come across some moments that risked going into the crowd and potentially making the coronavirus more palatable.
A less sexist industry?
The rejuvenating thing about returning to a personal GDC in San Francisco was the chance to randomly meet new people or hear a good story during a session. Anita Sarkeesian, creator of the Tropes vs. Women series videos, revised her criticism of sexist patterns in games a decade after it was originally released. She was pleased to see that the overt sexism she found in games a decade ago — such as the frequency of female characters whose butts were marked in titles — had diminished.
James Wardle shows a slide from his Wordle game.
For example, while she found many tropes in the original Dishonored (2012) game, she found none in the Dishonored 2 (2016) title of Bethesda’s Arkane that came out after the Tropes vs. Women series came out. She warned that we are nowhere near equality for the portrayal of women in games, and the industry still has a long way to go, but she let herself get emotional. A developer approached the microphone and tearfully thanked Sarkeesian for making it easier to come out as a trans person in games thanks to her critical work. Sarkeesian stepped off the stage, walked into the audience and gave the developer a long hug.
The industry has been rocked by sexual harassment scandals at companies like Activision Blizzard, Riot Games and Ubisoft. But it’s still encouraging to see the occasional moment of clarity and human connection in the midst of the darkness.
The power of language
As I looked around for other touching moments, I came back to Wardle’s speech. The creation of Wardle has revived the category of simple word games and Wordle has become one of the world’s greatest games.
wordle
The end result is a daily word guessing game. You try to guess a hidden word and you have only six attempts. If you guess a letter and the box turns gray, that means the letter isn’t in the word. If it turns yellow, it means the letter is in the word, but not in the correct position. If it turns green, the letter is in the solution and in the right place.
Wardle started working on the title back in 2013. He worked on word games for the Android mobile platform. He had originally built the game with over 13,000 words. But he thinned it out after testing the game with his partner. He stopped working on the title until the pandemic.
Suddenly it made sense to build something that could create a human connection for people stuck in lockdown. He made a series of decisions that would otherwise be considered mistakes, such as letting people play only once a day. He also decided it would be played on a website instead of a mobile app, largely because he knew how to develop for the web, but he was pretty bad at making apps. He chose not to make money from it because it was pointless if he just wanted to make a game for his partner.
Wardle and his partner have been testing the game on Wardle’s website for about six months.
“I made the game for her,” he said.
He slowly expanded access to the game. Then it took off when celebrities started playing it and posting their results on Twitter.
Since everyone suggested that he find a way to make money from it, Wardle decided he didn’t want the responsibility. So he sold it.
“I made this game, but I had no interest in running a game business,” he said.
James Wardle made Wordle for his partner.
He thought The New York Times would be a good steward.
Wardles said one of his favorite quotes was from literary theorist Terry Eagleton, who said, “Language is the air I breathe.” He believes that humans are creatures of language.
Wardle played a game called Mastermind when he was a kid, and Wordle is kind of a variation on that. While playing a New York Times crossword puzzle, Wardle decided to go back to the Wordle game design. (He thinks crosswords are one of the best multiplayer co-op games.) He also decided to have people work on the same game once a day so they could have something to discuss on social media. And all you had to do to get a friend to play was share the game on social media via a link.
“That ended up being a big part of the game,” he said.
Wardle made it easy to share your results from the game, and he released that in December 2021. And he found that it took off like a rocket. Celebrities like Paul McCartney raved about it. Jimmy Fallon talked about it on his show. Trevor Noah spoke about it too, as did Monica Lewinsky. And the spin-offs came into effect.
But what Wardle was happy about was the human connections. He came from a small town in Wales in the United Kingdom, and he was able to play the game with his father and mother. It means that they keep in regular contact by sharing their words with each other.
“That’s what I want,” he said.
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This post The DeanBeat: The inspirational talk from the creator of Wordle was a joy to hear on GDC
was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/25/the-deanbeat-wordle-creators-inspirational-talk-was-a-joy-to-hear-at-gdc/”