During the pandemic, a lot of people took solace in the simple, self-contained challenge of Wordle. They could share their score for the day with their friends if they chose to, but with its neat little stats panel, Wordle only really invites you to compete with yourself.
Inferiority Wordle (IW) started out as a simple clone using the same wordlist, but, taking a little inspiration from Bennett Foddy, I decided to instead take its simple premise and make it Evil:
- The words are chosen at random from the Wordle wordlist. You cannot bond with fellow players about your shared experience of the word of the day; the chance that you got the same word is 1 in 12,947.
- There is no curation of the word choice, so you're as likely to get 'BACON' as you are to get 'VARVE' (defined as 'an annual layer of sediment or sedimentary rock' (Wikipedia)). The words are all real, and it's nobody's fault but yours if you don't know them.
- Needless to say, Wordle Hard Mode is the only mode in IW - once a letter is in the correct position, all future guesses must take that into account. In addition, the non-matching letters of each guess are not shown to the user.
- Whether you win or lose, the end screen always leaves you the option to try again in the hopes of a more satisfactory outcome.
- If you succeed, you receive no congratulations; you only see your score placed on a scatter graph of other players' results, plotting time vs number of guesses. This not only allows you two axes by which to compare your performance to that of others, but also, by anonymising the data, distances you from your fellow players. You can't share your scores, and you have no context for the success of others. No record is kept of your past performance, winning streak, etc.
- If you fail, and other people have successfully guessed the same word, you will be presented with the average number of guesses and amount of time it took them to guess it. You will also be reminded, in case you felt short-changed, that all words are from the Wordle wordlist. Research on gambling addiction has shown that it's the near misses, in the context of the success of others, that keeps people coming back.
All of the design decisions in this game could conceivably have been made in good faith, but they combine to create an ethos of bleak, relentless, anonymous competition around a perfectly harmless central game mechanic. Design matters: with use, the hand shapes the handle, but the handle also shapes the hand. This is a game to make people worse.
Enjoy!
- Google Cloud Datastore
- Thymeleaf forms
- chart.js