 Nice. The first time I saw an 11 by 11 Rubik's cube I got a literal headache. I was a senior in high school and it was in the possession of a kid whose bipolar disorder indirectly resulted in me not failing ap physics under the tutelage of a man who a couple years later would leave the wife he met in high school for another girl he met in high school though this time she was one of his students and sure she was 18 when they eloped or whatever which is a clear improvement over the middle school teacher who was caught in his car with someone who wasn't but chances are she wasn't 18 whenever they started whatever it is they had going on so not great bob my physics teacher wasn't actually named bob but now that i'm thinking about it that that middle school monster might have been point is my classmate became a rubik's cube master that year it started with the regular three by three but he quickly moved on first of the four by four five by five seven by seven and as someone who has never even come close to solving that original cube i just i didn't even really understand when i was looking at and that 11 by 11 really broke me especially as i watched it slowly come together over the next few days was in some ways a more physical manifestation of the sunday crossword something that i've heard people talk about but never so much as looked at because like let's be honest it's terrifying hell prior to last week i'm not sure i'd ever really seriously attempted any crossword puzzle or any word games at all for that matter so it's real fucking weird that i've been playing so much word hello by the way and welcome to the week air view you can call me deeply insecure about my intelligence and today i am talking about this latest social media craze which has seemingly spawned as many offshoots as it did dollars in its recent new york times acquisition i'm sort of starting at the end there but it's an interesting bow to wrap the story in because the new york times was a key factor in wordles development creator josh wordles partner became a big fan of the times crossword and other word games and for her birthday he just went ahead and made her a new game one that he later posted publicly because like why not while it had social share features it wasn't meant to be a money maker it didn't have ads or sketchy tracking systems hell prior to that acquisition he probably lost a whole bunch of money on the endeavor since i imagine the spike in traffic to his personal website where it was initially hosted looked like hey google what's the tallest vertical cliff in the world mount thor according to kandey now look like mount thor you learn a lot from a person self description and wortel wants you to think of him as an artist first that's what he studied getting degrees in media and digital arts that he then leveraged into an office artist gig at reddit that turned into product management and then software engineering there he started doing broadly appealing timer-based interactive projects i recommend his 2018 talk about silicon valley april fools day bullshit in which he emphasized the value that artists can bring to the world of tech and 100 percent for sure we need fewer stem tech bros and more art tech bros and way more ethicist tech bros like imagine how much better our world would be if big tech was run by artists who actually understood ethics man can dream anyway wortels two big public successes at reddit worth the button a 60 second timer that would be reset any time a person pressed it but could only be pressed by any given person once yet ended up running for more than two months and the place a one million by one million collaborative grid that any given person could only contribute one pixel to every five minutes in the talk he goes over each you can watch it on youtube in a video that seems to have broken the platform because the thumbnail says that it's 90 minutes but it's only 22 his channel's kind of weird in general there are only eight videos plus one short most of which are under a minute long i can't say i enjoyed anything other than the talk but it's it's it's always interesting to see what people did before they accidentally strike gold wortel isn't collaborative because it was made for one person but it does work on a timer as with the now other new york times word games every day it reopens with a new solution let me back up wortel is a minimalist puzzle game containing just two elements a five by six grid and a virtual keyboard there is no app but it's clearly designed for phone use and looks kind of silly when accessed from a regular computer using the keyboard you type in a five letter word assuming it's in the database which was previously around 13 000 words long but has has changed under the new management each letter will flip one by one letting you know if the actual solution has that letter in that place by turning it green if the letter is in the word but it's in a different place turns yellow and if it's not in the letter at all turns gray the letters on the keyboard below will then change colors to match making it clear which letters you have and haven't tried as you continue your guesses you have six tries if you win it is added to your streak and a bar graph telling you how you're doing if you lose i don't know i've never lost though my streak broke when i bought this phone a couple of weeks ago while shooting the music video for my song about turning 30 my old phone fell on the ground and the corner cracked and i've been looking for an excuse to get a new one and the sudden loss of waterproofing seemed as good as any it's been my first foray into the world of word games as i mentioned earlier i've never done crosswords because i simply don't trust my vocabulary i try to be smart you know so so it feels bad when i can only brute force words into place and still have no fucking clue what they mean after dipping my toe into some of the other new york times games though like spelling bee and tiles i thought maybe why not try a few crosswords i got mondays in 29 minutes and 11 seconds tuesdays in one hour and two seconds and that was it i barely made it halfway through wednesday before running into four words in a row that i had never seen before and it became very clear to me that i wasn't going to get anything else it's easy to understand wordles appeal for one thing it is elegant as fuck i definitely prefer the dark mode of the original to the new york times's default white but the fundamentals are flawless in either that flip of each individual cell in sequence to reveal its color is perfectly timed and seeing those five letters come up green after racking your brain is some good gosh damn dopamine the simplicity is is the key there's nothing to distract you for those couple minutes that it takes you to get through you know maybe you'll post it on social media to the likelihood chagrin of your followers but then you go about your day it's just a silly little thing to do while you wait for water to boil or a light to turn green then again if you're not satiated there are a seemingly infinite number of clones that have popped up in its wake some of which are just the thing exactly but worse while others remix the formula in ways both textual and mechanical you've got things like loodle which only allows smutty words and taylor doll which is based on taylor swift lyrics but more interesting are games like wordled two which uses six letter words or quartal which puts four five letter grids on screen simultaneously and your guess for one is your guess for all you have nine tries to get four words each of these has up and downsides and they reveal what is and isn't good about the fundamental world experience now part of the reason i was inspired to talk about this at all was because the one person i follow on twitter who i have no personal or professional connection to film crit hulk said i think this is a bad game after getting either aroma or agora in three guesses i say either because wordled number 241 was the first divergence between the new york times version and wordles original which had something like 2000 answers pre-coded and could actually be saved in its entirety as a functional web app offline kind of like an nft but actually cool i got aroma and i wouldn't have gotten agora nor would most people it is why that solution was not only changed but completely removed from the new york times list of accepted words after moving it onto their site they removed some quote-unquote inappropriate words because i guess their player base is five-year-olds and fucking Mormons as well as more esoteric ones like agora but they didn't remove rote not rote rote r o a t e a word that apparently they do think people know albeit one that was never going to be one of the game's pre-coded answers now i know the word not because i have cared to ever understand the cumulative net earnings after taxes available to common shareholders adjusted for tax-affected amortization of intangibles for the calendar quarters in each calendar year but because some phd candidate on tiktok said that it was the programmatically determined best starting word you might have heard crane and adieu but this guy says wrote for reasons that i don't care enough to understand i used it once did exactly as well as i had done when i used to tower the day before and then stopped because here's the thing starting with a good word makes wordle dramatically less interesting this was why film crit hulk had a problem with it once you have a strategy you're virtually guaranteed to win and that's boring and look it's not like i'm over here starting with actively bad choices like lolly or imx that are basically equivalent to throwing a guess away but it's a far more interesting game if you start with something middle of the road twins or meats which have a few key letters you often see but also aren't mathematically maximized to get you the dub as with so many other things in life once you start optimizing the active engagement loses a lot of its appeal that dopamine doesn't hit nearly as hard variants like quartal increase the challenge substantially in a way that even those cheat words can only do so much for which likely explains why my one and only run of that game ended with a genuine feeling of accomplishment and an involuntary fist pump but the additional complexity also increases the probability that you will run into words you don't know and that's really when it all falls apart i have never heard the word agora outside the context of the phobia and i know that if i had played that version of the game and that round it would have been the end of my time with wordle similarly it's very frustrating when i know a word that it doesn't recognize ludal is a particular offender here so many words don't work and i got sick of it almost immediately because there's only so many times i can default to pussy incidentally one of the words the new york times removed from wordle's database before i'm just like over it and it's four i did it four times i've yet to lose a wordle adjacent game but i did give up on ludal halfway through my fifth attempt and never went back you might count that but i'm not you and thank god because you sound terrible which brings us to the conclusion that wordle is only as good as you are at it while the winning words are generally pretty common if your vocabulary is lacking you're going to have a terrible time which likely explains the cottage industry that has built up online of folks offering clues to the day's solution that feels ridiculous to me given that it takes about as long to read these articles as wordle intended for you to play a round of the game in the first place but i i get the impulse people want to be involved and they feel like they can't be without some sort of help which the game doesn't provide because of course it doesn't it wasn't meant for bass consumption it was meant to be one person's birthday gift but it's also something that the new york times paid seven figures for so you know the humble beginnings don't really mean much anymore six point nine out of ten thank you so much for watching and thank you particularly to my patrons my mom my cat cat sarah kata benjamin schiff anthony cole elliott fowler greg lucina kojo phil baits willow i am the sword riley zimmerman claire bear taylor lindy's andrew madison design and the folks who'd rather be read than said if you like this video that's great if you want to see more please subscribe i'll hope to see you in the next one