a retrospective of wordle in the style of godspeed you! black emperor

 

the government is corrupt/and we’re on so many drugs/with the radio on/and the curtains drawn

 

its 2022 and we are all fucked. seems unlikely we will survive the pandemics, climate change, societal collapse, meteors, republicans, billionaires. the list of things we might actually die from quite soon is alarming. if we do make it – and its a big if – our mental health and our bond with other human beings will never be the same. as a race, we are struggling. we sit in little rooms and find things to be upset about. we take drugs and fuck each other through text boxes. we download anime girls of questionable age, we start culture magazines online. we pretend we have friends but we just don’t. not anymore. we have pixels and ssri’s. we have no hope of anything beyond surviving long enough to see our species extinguished. we’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine/and the machine is bleeding to death.

 

of course, there was once a savior… someone who came back from the dead. someone who promised unity. someone who once did something quite magnificent, then went very quiet indeed. someone selfless. i’m talking, of course, about jesus christ josh wardle.

 

it went like this:

 

wardle created the reddit patchwork place in 2017. most people don’t know that about him. if you don’t know what place is/was, it’s a huge artwork that a lot of redditors came together to make, one pixel at a time. it’s an impressive feat, especially because most redditors struggle to dress themselves. i can’t do justice to it in words, you need to go see it. then 3 days 4 years later he created a word game for his wife. the game was called wordle, because his name is wardle and it’s about words. if you want to see how far we have fallen as a species, spend five minutes scrolling through the thousands of tweets promulgating the coincidence that the name wardle is so similar to wordle, as if he had zero say in the matter. 

 

suffice to say, wordle was popular. as i write this, 300,000 people play wordle a day. that’s a lot of people. wordle is like the old game mastermind, in that you get a blank space and need to fill it. mastermind used colors, but wordle asks you to find a five letter word. when you get a letter in the right place it goes green. when you get a letter in the wrong space it goes yellow. if your letter is wrong it remains gray. wordle is the bastard offspring of lots of games, but it is simple, which people like, and daily, which people also like. it sits nicely beside the morning cup of coffee as a part of the routine which does not wear you down quite as much as the rest of the day. 

 

you grabbed my hand/and we fell into it/like a daydream/or a fever

 

the thing about wordle is, it brings people together. it’s incredibly easy to share your results on social media without giving the answer away. it’s the same word for everyone every day. so you can instantly feel smarter than your friends. this is an important part of being happy. the need to feel superior to the people you like is as much a factor in life as breathing or shitting. wordle created a unity that 2022 desperately needed. the thing is, i have never known the intimate details of so many people’s lives. and yet, i often feel utterly alone. my wife is smarter than me and i sweat when i eat. one of our dogs simply does not like me. i havent seen my parents in 4 years. my mother is slowly dying. i needed wordle, and its instant hit of gratification.

 

i open up my wallet/and its full of blood

 

last week it was announced that wordle was being sold to the new york times, who could put it behind a paywall. as of now, it remains free. but the idea that it will be monetized is as important to us as the need to play the game. we revel in this shit. we can share our outrage over wordle just as easily as we can share that we got the word moist in 5 goes. josh wardle, a man who previously did not have a million dollars, now has several of them, and the hand wringing is astonishing. whenever someone releases something out into the world, we feel like we own it. we say ‘wordle would never be as popular if i hadnt played it’ or ‘he who giveth also taketh a-fucking-way i guess’ and things like that. wordle made us happy, which is more than 99% of things do. but instead of feeling good for this guy who made something of himself, we want to drag him down to our level. we want josh wardle to suffer. we want to nail him to a cross and poke his fucking eyes out.

 

the buildings toppled in on themselves/mothers clutching babies/picked through the rubble/and pulled out their hair

 

it’s fine that wardle sold wordle. and here is why. because we are all dying. and if one man wants to sell his word game and give himself and his family a comfortable, nice life while we all gyrate endlessly – on fire – then that is his decision to make. wordle is not the answer. wardle is not the savior. wordle was simply a way of feeling something. wardle was the man who gave us something to wake up for. and, like everything that is good, it has been taken from us.

 

interviewer: are you ready for what’s coming?

 

blaise bailey finnegan iii: ready as i’ll ever be

 

interviewer: most people aren’t

 

the year is 2043 and a dark wind blows. the remaining sludge of humanity crawl through the streets, cautious not to attract attention. skin sloughs from their disgusting bodies and is picked upon by the now dominant corvids. there is, of course, dissonant harmonica. one of these festering pockets of blood sees something in the sky. it is the face of josh wardle. he has returned with an invention so amazing, so utterly necessary, that the human race will be restored. he is wearing flowing robes, crafted from the blue light of the heavens. now more people are alert, more eyes look up to the sky. there is a murmur. wardle has returned. this is what we waited for. this is why we fought so hard. we lost, but we fought.

 

josh wardle smiles and reaches into his eternal pocket. he pulls out a tiny purple cube. we are saved.