Your Wordle strategy can say a lot about you, says expert

The online game Wordle has recently taken the internet by storm. Thousands of users log on to play the game, taking to social media platforms to post about their wins and losses. Reportedly, how someone plays the game, a simple daily word puzzle, can indicate a lot of things about how they view the world around them. Cultural critic and author Linda Holmes, writing for NPR, explained that she believes Wordle is a metaphor for life. According to her, this meant that you could "learn a lot about different ways to see the world from different ways to play Wordle."

"For one thing, there is easy mode, and there is hard mode," she writes. "If you post your results after playing in hard mode, they appear with a little asterisk. It is the humblebrag of Wordle. But of course, you can choose to play in hard mode without switching the game to hard mode. You can play in hard mode on the honor system. This means that you will not get your little asterisk next to your results, but you will know you played on hard mode. As often happens in life, you are presented with a choice between telling everyone that you overcame an obstacle and smugly knowing and keeping to yourself the delicious knowledge that you overcame an obstacle."

The author continues, discussing matters of risk and making difficult discussions. She states, "The disadvantage of playing on easy mode is that if you make that leap from RENTS to BALMY with the information that the final word contains an R, you know that BALMY is not the final answer... Would you rather play it safe and BALMY and be better equipped to avoid the difficult six-guess day or the dreaded didn't-even-get-it-on-the-sixth-guess day; or would you rather bet on yourself, on your capacity for glory, and fly 'Top Gun'-style into battle with your ROYAL flag waving?"

Holmes then points to how Wordle could even represent how superstitious you are. "Some people start every day with the very same first guess, usually something like CARTS or TRAIN that has a lot of common letters in it," she states. "Other people (I am one of these) take a different stab at it every day." Finally, she addresses the need for a method or secret strategy—or the lack of it. The critic notes, "I am strangely preoccupied with last letters, myself. Once I have a sense of where one letter might be, it's surprising how often the possible last letters begin to contract in number. But in all likelihood, this is no better as a solution strategy than anything else; I just like it. Because it's how I do it. It's how I Wordle."

Whether you play Wordle every single day or gave up after the first few tries, it may be worthwhile to consider Holmes's perspective on the online game as a metaphor for life. After all, don't we all just want to be part of something light and fun right now?