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| A Brief History of Word Games – From Crosswords to Wordle | ||
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Modérateurs: Issun Dayo, reylan, Pilatomic
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| Auteur | Message | ||
| Infinite Wordle |
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 Membre enregistré #3410 Inscrit le: mer. juil. 29 2026, 06:20Messages: 1 | Playing around with words is the feature of human nature, but particular forms of it have emerged not so long ago and have been created not as part of the folklore but by the individual inventions. There is very little way from the newspaper puzzle to the browser game, and there is much when this could not happen. Before print Wordplay is an old practice, even riddles can be found on Sumerian tablets and the acrostics and anagrams in the classical literature, including the famous palindrome, which was called Sator Square and was found in ancient Roman sites, including Pompeii. What puzzles had in common is that they have been invented. The person invented a puzzle and people solved it or enjoyed it. To make it possible to make puzzles widely available cheap printing and literacy were needed, and this happened only in the nineteenth century. The crossword, 1913 Modern age started with the invention of Arthur Wynne, his diamond shape grid named word-cross which was published in New York World in December 1913. This puzzle has been created initially as the filler for Sunday supplement. It became so popular that in the 1920s newspapers had to write articles how it was a waste of time and the library had to complain about people occupying the whole dictionary. But this is the scheme which was repeated throughout the history: firstly, the puzzle was rejected, and then it was embraced by everybody. Crossword laid the foundation for almost all the future puzzles: daily puzzles, universal solutions, and regular publishing of them. Scrabble, 1938 Butts, who worked as an architect and calculated the distribution of the letters using the pages of the newspapers is the man who defined the value of the letters in the Scrabble. The game was rejected by the established companies several times before becoming popular in the 1950s. Scrabble became so important because it has introduced the elements of competition and sociability to the puzzle genre. The universal list of words is the idea which was introduced by the Scrabble as the judge of the words. The middle era The following decades have given rise to all those puzzles which people grew up with. Boggle appeared in 1972 and the innovation was the simultaneity: the game is played by all the players at once, no turns required. Countdown appeared as the British TV show in 1982 and has transformed the word puzzles into the spectacle. Puzzles of the newspapers were complemented by the anagrams, the word searches, and the cryptic crosswords, which became the art in Great Britain. The pattern of those decades was that word puzzles existed both in print and in the box and daily puzzles were the primary form of them. Internet, and what has changed because of it The internet-based word puzzles have been mostly digitizations of the pre-existing formats. Crossword puzzles have become the online games, Scrabble has been reborn as Words with Friends, and the innovations mostly were related to convenience and asynchronous gameplay rather than to the mechanics. But the novelty which internet brought to the world of word games was the possibility to create the shared daily experience of them. The newspaper crossword puzzle is something that is shared with the readership. Internet puzzle can be shared by everyone at once and can be immediately discussed. Wordle, 2021 The puzzle format of the current era was invented by Josh Wardle as the personal game for his girlfriend. It has been released publicly in October 2021 and has reached millions of players in three months before being acquired by the New York Times in the early 2022. Nothing in the mechanics was new. Colour-coding system of the right letters in the right place is the variation of the pen-and-paper puzzle Bulls and Cows and the commercial version of the idea – the Mastermind – has used the same mechanics using colour pegs in 1970. But the novelty of Wordle was its packaging: one puzzle per day for everyone, six tries, and the sharing grid of the colour squares which allows the player to share their results without disclosing the answer. The sharing format might have been the real innovation as it has transformed the private four-minute game into the public discussion. What has come after Clones appeared immediately and the innovation here was quite unusual: instead of changing the word list developers changed what is hidden in the game. And it has proven once again that Wordle has accidentally proved: the loop of deduction works for any hidden answer. The words have never been the point. Where it stands now The current era is the era of scarcity loosening. The daily format helped to form the audience, but it has also limited the amount of playing, kept the difficulty of the puzzles at the same level and made the social aspect of it impossible because it is impossible to compete with somebody about the word that has already been guessed. The unlimited formats solve that. Wordle Unlimited has kept the daily puzzle for the ritual, but added the unlimited rounds, adjustable length of the words from three to seven letters, timed game, themed packs and the live multiplayer rooms at wordleunlimited.dev. From the historical perspective, it is the return to the ancient practice. Before the newspapers have made the puzzles the daily instalments, they have been the games that can be played until one wanted and often played by the groups of people. The daily format was the effect of printing and it took a century to overcome this medium. https://wordleunlimited.dev/ | ||
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