I have been surrounded by puzzles my entire life. I mean this literally. My father is a bonafide puzzler. Not jigsaw puzzles; I'm talking pen and paper puzzles. His peg is wordplay. Crosswords, cryptics, anagrams, cryptograms, all of it. He has taken my family to puzzle conventions often. He's a prolific constructor, too. He's been published in a certain major newspaper multiple times and even runs puzzle hunts regularly. It gets annoying, sometimes. I don't mind the test solves he asks of us. It's the other stuff. He'll turn a simple dinner conversation topic into a riddle, a game of guessing, hamfisting puns and clues. I think in my teenage years, that frustration with parents dripped down onto puzzles. I considered them geeky, dorky, not something I would ever like, no no no. Alas, my hat is thoroughly chewed; puzzles are fun. I'm nowhere near the kind of puzzler he is, not even close, but I've come around on it. I'll toy with a crossword, I’ll knock out a KenKen, I'll give a cryptic a shot (and fail), and I'll play Wordle.

Wordle is Mastermind but with letters. It's not a complex or new idea; this has been done before and will be done again. That's not a criticism. It's just a fact. It's a slick, well-made version of it created by Josh Wardle for his girlfriend. It works. It's fun. The key difference was the ease by which you could share your solutions online. Presumably, this was a huge influence on its popularity, which abruptly skyrocketed in the tail end of 2021. Seeing people post their scores is near ubiquitous, whether you were on Discord or Twitter. It’s a fun daily distraction to toil over. The limit of guesses encourages some strategizing. On Discord, we crafted theories and ran simulations. It became a delightful little problem of probabilistic reduction and linguistic statistics.

But I’m not here to talk about Wordle, but rather what’s happening to it. Puzzles seem to be on an abrupt uptick. I have no clue why. In the past year, I've seen people I'd never expect to talking about daily crosswords in the New York Times. Spelling Bee in the New York Times Magazine is also wildly popular and served as an inspiration for Wordle. If I had to guess why, it would have to be due to the global pandemic having a lot of people down-time they would typically spend doing something else. As well as, perhaps, the NYT's strategy of pushing their Games publication. Maybe you’re noticing something.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard. A bit later, Sony bought Bungie. Now, the New York Times has bought Wordle. Maybe this seems unrelated to you. But I can't help but see it as part of a pattern of rapid consolidation of gaming markets. Obviously, this is a widespread issue not limited to games, or media for that matter. Mergers and acquisitions seem to show up every few weeks. Anti-trust law isn't what it used to be in the US, and companies are constantly cannibalizing each other. By all means, Josh Wardle made the right choice. He was probably losing money by hosting Wordle, and he was smart to cash out. Good for him.

The NYT did not buy Wordle because it was a novel invention. The NYT bought it because it wants to be the only thing you think of when you think of the word "puzzles". Don't think of just any old newspaper, don't think of other websites or apps, don't think of GAMES Magazine or Nicoli or even those airport pulp bricks, think of the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine only. They could have easily made a Wordle version of their own. They wanted the name and the brand recognition. They want you to remember where the puzzles are. The only puzzles. Are they succeeding?

Wordle won’t die after this. It’s going to live forever. It’s been assimilated into the Borg. “Join us or die.” Even as folks burn out on it, or it’s fad-fame withers, there will still be countless players. It’s in the New York Times, after all. Will it stay popular? Probably. To some degree, certainly. And what of the countless Wordle-likes? The leagues of distractions, too numerous to list, ranging from copies to inventive reimaginings? Will they rise above it all? Well, I’m not optimistic. As much as I’d like to be able to say I think a wave of independent puzzles will come crashing down on the shore, spreading an anarchistic jubilee of puzzles on the sands, I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s not going to happen in games, either. These moments result in flares of creativity and then a quiet march into obscurity. I’ve seen how hard it is to fight against cultural monopolies. Call it path-of-least-resistance, call it the Pareto principle, call it a process of preferential attachment, it’s gonna end up the same way: the slow oligopolization of cultural commodities with straggling indies. I’m not optimistic. I hope to be proven wrong. There’s a time for everything to come crumbling down. But until then, Wordle is fun. While it lasts.