Wordle Was Designed for People to Hate It

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So, tell me.

Listen. Not since the "moist drama" have I seen this many people rallying up to hate on words. And on a word game, for that matter. I can understand friendships being ruined and families breaking apart over a heated Monopoly match, but what did this Wordle game do to deserve the animosity? Did it make The Beatles break up? Did it smack Chris Rock across the face? No—it just makes you guess a 5-letter word.

That doesn't make much sense.

It makes even less sense when we talk about something as innocuous as this game is. For starters, it’s free—and not "Candy Crush" free, for which you need to make your iPhone warp into the year 2077 to keep playing gratis. Wordle's one-puzzle-a-day restriction also makes it impossible to binge, and you don't have to tick a Terms and Conditions box that gives Mark Zuckerberg the right to predate on your browser history for ad revenue. This game could only be more wholesome if it was invented by Jesus and made panda bears care about their shrinking population numbers.

Hard to argue with this: Josh Wardle wasn't trying to invent the next Angry Birds, but to create a gift for his girlfriend. "Wordle" is a play on his last name, and I gotta say, thank god his name is not Josh Medick or we'd be playing with something much different here.

So half of all people hate it?

Yes. And all thanks to these tiny little fucking squares I'm sure you've seen all over social media:

⬛🟩⬛🟨⬛
⬛🟩⬛🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Why? Well, living through the zenith of Cancel Culture, you'd think some colourblind Gen-Zer made those squares offensive by making a decaffeinated point about the game's lack of inclusivity—but don't worry, that's not the reason. What these coloured blocks are doing is tickling a powerful psychological dichotomy inside our heads we call "Us Vs Them."

I'm listening.

"Us Vs Them" is one of those vestigial features from our troglodyte days, back when our ancestors were meddling with the cast of Ice Age and watching the aliens build the pyramids. Simply put, there are two kinds of people in the world, Us's and Thems, and everything that is "Us" we like, and everything that is "Them" we dislike. It's a little bit like the appendix: it has some uses, we think, but today we mostly see it get swollen and fuck around with people's lives.

Hard to argue with this: during the filming of Planet of the Apes in 1967, the cast naturally segregated based on the costume they wore—chimps ate with chimps, gorillas with gorillas, orangutans with orangutans, and so on. Charlton Heston ate alone, I imagine, as he was the only Gun Rights Movement Icon on set.

So how is Wordle messing around with it?

Those cryptic little squares are not immediately understandable, aren't they? To know what's going on, you either have to buy into the fad early, or wait until your feed looks like a polygonal Christmas tree to hate-search "what the fuck is wordle." Either way, your brain has already sorted everyone into "Us" and "Them." Just like it would with your horoscope, your Hogwarts house, or whatever pronoun you kids like to use these days.

In the know: we "Us-Them" the world in a million different ways. It's no wonder it also happens with word games.

• Children can be little dicks because of it.

• Companies have to be careful of mergers ruining their company culture due to "Us-Them-ing." The same situation is hilarious if you watch season 3 of The Office, though.

• The point is, get yourself a green beard.

So, technically...

Wordle was designed for half the people to hate it, the half that didn't buy into it. Because now they have to endure all the "Thems" carrying those pesky little squares all across social media, telling everyone how well they did on today's puzzle. And given how engagement-hungry this virtual habitat is, where everyone has likes, retweets, and all their social validation needs waiting for them to take a stance, it doesn't matter how candid and wholesome a trend is—people will still find a reason to shit on it.