A complicated, love-hate relationship with WordleBot

When even our harmless and pleasant diversions are turned into measurable achievements or failures, what can we do?

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Watching your kids get older is a parade of measurable milestones: first words, first steps, first day of school.

Some of them you can see coming quite clearly, even if they are many years in the future: a driver’s license; college; maybe even marriage and kids of their own.

Some of them just sort of happen without ceremony, though, simply becoming the new status quo.

All three of our kids (10, 7 and 4) still insist on having either my wife or I help put them to bed. We read books and tell stories, developing similar but individualized rituals rooted in quality time. We don’t leave the room until they are asleep.

This takes a lot of energy. But there will come a point, perhaps abruptly, when they all in succession will decide they no longer need us to be part of that process. It has already started, at least a little, with our 10-year-old as she asserts independence and separation (in a good way) from her siblings and us.

But for now, one of the constants when it’s my turn to help her fall asleep is that we do the New York Times daily games together. When she’s exhausted from a long day and knows she will fall asleep in a matter of a few minutes she will still say, “Can we at least do the Wordle?”

I almost always let her pick the opening word as we begin the process of deciphering the puzzle. She always knows there are two ways to get to the solution: the fun way and the most efficient way.

We both know this because after the puzzle is solved, we are immediately told how well we did and what we might have done differently.

It’s an interesting, rewarding and infuriating process that, I would argue, is a snapshot of modern life.

It is courtesy of the WordleBot, and we are in a complicated, love-hate relationship.

The premise of Wordle is pretty simple: Try to figure out a five-letter word in six guesses or fewer, using process of elimination. Every time you make a guess, the five squares tell you if you have the right letter in the right place, the right letter in the wrong place or a letter that is not part of the solution at all.

Even “wrong” guesses contain information and help narrow down the possibilities. It stands to reason, then, that picking words with a lot of high-frequency letters (particularly on the first guess) is a good idea. Most “Wordlers” operate under this premise.

Simply finishing the puzzle should be satisfactory. But the reams of data produced after the puzzle is done will tell you otherwise.

Wordle keeps your all-time stats, telling you not only how often you completed the puzzle overall but also how many turns it has taken you each time.

If you have ever played or followed golf, it is impossible to not immediately sort this data into a sort of scoring system: Wordle par is 4, average. Any number higher than that is bad, and any number below that is good.

WordeBot, though, goes much deeper on that day’s puzzle. The first screen tells you your skill level in completing the task and compares it to the average of everyone who has also finished that day’s puzzle. It does the same for your “luck” level, a semi-controversial metric that can cut both ways. And it tells you how many tries, on average, it took puzzle-doers to finish that day.

AND THEN it goes screen by screen with each guess you made, ranking your skill level and comparing it to what the WordleBot would have chosen. It gives you constructive but sometimes condescending messages along the way, like “adieu was a good guess, but arise would have been more efficient.”

Said Josh Katz, one of the bot’s creators, in a recent Times piece about WordleBot: “Skill is probably better understood as efficiency, which is basically like, how close to the bot did you play?”

Ultimately, it shows you how the WordleBot would have solved the puzzle. If you beat (or tie) the WordleBot, its almost always because you had more “luck.” There is no overt gloating from the WordleBot when it has a better score than you, but there is a subtle smugness detected in its phrase, “Here is how I would have solved the puzzle on my own, without considering your prior guesses.”

What I hear is: “Look, dumbass, I’m trying to show you exactly how to win every day. Feel free to disregard it, but don’t say you weren’t warned.”

Because WordleBot starts with the exact same word every single day: Crane. It has ruthlessly examined all possible puzzles and determined that this five-letter combination maximizes the chances of completing the task the quickest.

Now, truth be told I used to start with the same word almost every day: Alert. Then one strange night I had a hankering for a different word and something told me to start with “merit.” And that ended up being the solution — a hole-in-one, if we can continue the golf metaphor.

Perhaps that loosened me up a little to the possibilities of variance. But more so, it was this: picking the same starting word every day started to get boring. And it’s somehow even worse when you know how efficient it is.

So, you might ask, why not just ignore the WorldeBot and do the puzzle on your own terms and for your own enjoyment. Two things:

1. My 10-year-old likes the WordleBot. She likes to know how we did, insists on knowing if we beat the bot and wants to see how it would have solved the puzzle.

2. I am a lot like her. A part of me likes to know all these things, too — hence the love-hate relationship with WordleBot. If you give me data, I am hard-pressed to ignore it. If you tell me I did a good job, a part of me lights up inside. If you tell me I could have done better, a part of me will internalize it and want to improve.

It’s the same with the adjacent NYT “Spelling Bee,” whereby I will not let myself fall asleep until I have attained the highest level of “genius” (or, if I have dozed off and woken up to my phone crashing down, at least the second-highest of “amazing”).

These aren’t necessarily bad tendencies, though they are worth unpacking for both myself and our kids (as I am right now, coincidentally, while listening to the audiobook version of Rainesford Stauffer’s “All the Gold Stars.”)

I think my larger grievance toward WordleBot is a complaint about how it is representative of so many facets of life these days.

It is the crushing creep of sameness — in a two-way cause-effect relationship with efficiency — that I am trying to reject but finding so often in the world around us.

Former MLB manager Joe Maddon articulated how it plays out in baseball (and sports in general) very well recently: “Everybody wants to be like everybody else in today’s world, in today’s game. I really believe in the individuality of the group.”

Individuality and group might seem at odds with each other, but in a team sports concept it means going about trying to win with a distinct style or collective approach.

The information we have, though, makes that difficult. Pitchers, with the help of specialists, know how to add more velocity or spin to their various offerings. They can fine-tune their deliveries and mechanics with the help of specified video, helping them not only succeed but repeat that success.

Teams know that walks and home runs are efficient. Batters know that trying to hit impossible pitches has less upside than hoping they are an inch off the plate and called a ball. Much of the game has been reduced to a parade of pitchers throwing explosive stuff (at least until they inevitably get hurt) and batters waiting for them to make a mistake so they can hit it over the fence. As more teams catch up to the data and copy the formula, it all blurs together.

Basketball suffers from some of this as well, given what we know about the efficiency of three-pointers and free throws. And football might be the worst of all, with offensive systems designed for a succession of seven-yard gains and defenses designed to give those up until the offense messes up.

The result of a football game feels less and less like a tribute to the team that played the best. More and more it comes down to which team got the handful of fortunate bounces and which one had the ball last. (Not coincidentally, this is more or less how politics in 2024 feel as well. Everyone has the same playbook, everybody knows the most efficient paths to victory (and more importantly the least-likely path to losses), so every contest comes down to a few unaccounted for breaks and whichever team has the ball last).

This sameness in these and so many other aspects of life maximizes results at the expense of process. It insists that we quantify everything along the way so that maybe next time we will win by 0.1 points.

When even our harmless and pleasant diversions like Wordle are turned into measurable achievements or failures, what can we do?

Perhaps the answer is a sort of case-by-case rebellion combined with an attitude determined to savor the process while also understanding that results are also important.

Our 10-year-old seems to embody that spirit in a lot of parts of her life, Wordle included. She always thinks long and hard about her opening word, sometimes playing to win and sometimes acting her age with semi-crude and inefficient salvos.

Somewhere between dutifully and gleefully, I enter those five-letter words for her, knowing full well that sometimes it’s going to cost me in those long-term stats.

It makes the 10-year-old still lurking inside of me laugh when the bot has to spit out sentences like, “Booty is a decent opening word, and a distinctive one. On average, I can solve a Wordle in 3.8 steps when I start by guessing BOOTY.”

And it was my turn for smug satisfaction the other day when we solved a puzzle in four turns using “farts” as an opener, while it took the bot five tries with all the machine-learned efficiency it could muster (even if WordleBot insisted that luck played a big role in our victory).

We’ll keep playing that way before bedtime for as long as she wants.

I have no idea how long that will be, but sometimes you don’t want to know how it ends while you’re still in the middle of it all.