Learning From the Empty Squares
Life Lessons From the Game of Wordle
Some games have been around forever. Chess is the first to come to mind, though a Google search tells me that Backgammon and Checkers are thousands of years older. Other games quickly rise in popularity and almost as quickly fall. Are you old enough to remember Trivial Pursuit? The smash hit of the 1980s is still around in some form, but it’s hardly the commonly played party game it once was.
When the online game “Wordle” came out, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It seemed fun enough, but how long would people (and by “people,” I mean “I”) stay interested in daily five-letter word games? Why did the New York Times decide to buy it? When, if ever, will they start charging for it? And what are we to make of all the Wordle spin-offs, like the much more difficult challenge of “Quordle” (Wordle, but playing four puzzles at once with nine tries to solve them all).
I’m now over 100 games into Wordle and haven’t gotten bored with it yet. I’m even in a Wordle Facebook group consisting of 119 alumni of my college (and growing). We enjoy seeing each other’s green, yellow, and black or white squares (depending on what tools you use to post the images), and exchanging witty comments, like “I went down the rabbit hole,” or “five swings to get to the green” (that one I wrote when I had no green squares until I got to the fifth row.) The group’s unwritten rule is that any comments you post must not include hints to the correct solution in that day’s game. Oh, and be thoughtful of members occupying distant time zones. Other than that, we have fun.
For the uninitiated, Wordle is a game that can be played only once a day. It is comprised of a grid of five blank squares across and six down. Under those squares lies a word that can be discovered by trial and error. If you guess the word in six tries or fewer, you win. If not, you lose. A completed Wordle grid looks like this:
As you might infer from this cleverly worded example taken from the NY Times website (I don’t charge for this newsletter of limited circulation so I’m claiming fair use), the first guess goes in the first row, the second in the second row, etc. A yellow square means that you found a letter that’s in the hidden word but you put it in the wrong place. A green square means you found a letter in the right place. A blank (in this example, gray) square means the letter is not in the hidden word at all.
The example shown above was obviously created by a clever Times editor who perfectly communicated the publication’s message using six five-letter words. But let’s use it as a model from which to draw a few conclusions.
For example, let’s focus on the first and second rows. Though this isn’t a real puzzle, the hypothetical player did pretty well with that first guess. They found two letters in the correct position and a third letter to boot, though that one’s in the wrong square. Most Wordle players wouldn’t use the word “guess” in their first attempt because if there is no “s” in the hidden word they would have wasted two squares on a single letter instead of just one.
But notice what happens next. Rather than use the three found letters (G, E, and S) in the second row, the imaginary player uses five entirely new letters. You might think that would never happen in a real game, since the player already found three perfectly good letters and might hope to guess the solution on the second try. But that’s not the only strategy that makes sense here. Another is to forget about solving the puzzle in the second row and use all five of that row’s blank squares to find or eliminate untested letters. While doing so eliminates your chance of winning in two tries, by providing more information, it increases your chances of winning in the six that you’re allotted.
“Okay,” you might say, “but if this were a real puzzle (it’s definitely not!), this person wasted that entire second attempt because none of the letters they tried had a green or yellow hit.” You might say that, but you’d be wrong. Learning what letters are not in the hidden word provides useful information that can help you solve the puzzle in future tries. While it’s always better to find a letter (nice rhyme there, eh?), eliminating possibilities also moves you closer to ultimate success.
If you remember the game “Battleship,” that same principle applies. By learning where your opponent’s pieces are, as well as where they are not, you can figure out the size of their ship and where it is located. Every turn does not have to be a hit to make it useful. Similarly, in Wordle, if you’re running out of turns (for example, if you have only two rows left), you sometimes might be better off using entirely unused letters to narrow down the possibilities before your sixth and final attempt, even though you know that most of the letters you’ll be testing will not be in the hidden word. (That’s a strategy I’ve employed successfully, but it requires more of an explanation than I’m prepared to give in this short post.)
By the way, you might be wondering how I know the example I’ve shown could not reasonably be a real puzzle. I’ll let you try to figure that out, and I’ll provide my answer below.
“Great,” you say, “but what does this game have to do with life?” I thought you’d never ask.
It’s simply this. Life is full of uncertainty and risk. Sometimes those risks pay off, other times they don’t. We hit, we miss. We win some, we lose some. We succeed, we fail. And after each miss, loss, and failure, we go on with our lives.
The trick is not to waste the misses. Use them. Learn from them. Just as the Wordle player and the Battleship player learn from the misses in their games, we can learn from our misses in life. We need to approach our misses as only temporary setbacks that offer opportunities for growth and learning. If we let them overwhelm us, we will have caused our own defeat. If instead we learn from them, grow from them, and even let them motivate us, we will be better for having experienced them. And if we are afraid to take reasonable risks because we assume or fear that we will fail, we may miss out on many of the blessings life has to offer.
So in life as in Wordle, don’t be afraid of wasting a turn, and don’t be discouraged when it doesn’t work out the way you had hoped. If you approach the game with the right attitude, no turn, and no miss, is ever really wasted.
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If you haven’t yet figured out the answer to why this puzzle is definitely not real, take a look at the letter “I.” The player uses it in three different turns, each one unsuccessful. While there can be good reasons to use a turn with entirely unused letters, there is rarely a good reason to use a letter you discover is not in the puzzle multiple times.