WordlThe creator of , Josh Wardle, gave a talk at this year’s GDC that brought joy to people. Described by a listener As “the opposite of every NFT and Metaverse panel,” Wardle explained during the talk that the hit game was developed way back in 2013.
From the beginning Wordlthe meteoric rise of , its developer Josh Wardle showed exceptional modesty combined with a lack of desire to make money from the project. This seemed contagious as the developer of another app with the same name donated his fortune to a charity of Wardle’s choice. Then earlier this year Wardle sold the game The New York Times. This, as Ars Technica
Wardle had previously toyed with the idea of making a word-based version of the 1970s board game back in 2013. thought leader. However, he notes that he quickly learned that this cannot be achieved by simply typing every five-letter word in the dictionary.
Words like “BYDED”, “DAWTS” and “BWAZI” turned out not at all fun to try to deduce, just like any combination of colored pencils could be in it thought leader. This led Wardle to realize that the secret ingredient was letting the player make inferences based on their own familiarity with the language. It’s about, he said, “what you can tease out based on what you know about language.”
Incredibly, to accomplish this, Wardle’s partner devoted her time to sorting all 13,000 five-letter words in the dictionary into one of three categories: “I know,” “I don’t know,” and “I might know.” With that, the word list was refined and ready to use! In 2014. At this point, Wardle lost interest in the project.
Then there was a pandemic.
Wardle was clearly doing well Wordl in the end with the seven-figure buy-out by the NOW. But it remains fascinating how much he didn’t want to monetize the game when he owned it. During the lecture, the audience erupted in applause frequently when he said he had no desire to sell ads or figure out how to squeeze out the profit.
While the Games Developer Conference is widely viewed as a bastion of indie gaming and progressive development, it’s actually just as riddled with corporate bullshit as the rest of the conventions. This year, you could have attended sessions like Transforming Games With The Blockchain Economy, Understanding NFTs: A Sea-Change For F2P Games, and The Magic That Makes The Metaverse Feel Real. So a conversation like Wardle’s can be an oasis.
Wardle called his talk “Doing the opposite of what you’re meant to do,” citing his creation of a website, not an app, and limiting players to just one game a day. Oh, and that he “had a terrible URL”.
Wardle then went on to encourage others to create puns as well. He pointed out that if your games are based on words, you don’t have to explain them to your audience. You are already familiar with words. as VentureBeat reportsWardle quoted his hero, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton, as saying, “Language is the air I breathe.” He went on to call humans “linguistic beings.”
Wordl has become a game that connects many people every day, from me and some old school friends sharing our daily scores, to Wardle himself texting his parents in Wales from his home in New York while they were doing the play game together.