It was a day I’ll long remember. (Of course, it was only two weeks ago.)

It started at the crack of dawn, but success had now eluded me for eight hours. (Eight hours!) Over and over, I would return to the same web page until the matrix of letters eventually became hieroglyphics. Meanwhile, when I checked out Twitter, I would be bombarded by lone images showing others’ proud postings: two or three rows with those damn green squares. (So-and-so got it in only three and I’m on five tries, like an idiot?!)

Fortunately (she said sarcastically), the positive-mantra app “I am”—which I’d recently installed on my phone—serendipitously popped up a message: “I choose not to compare myself to others.“ (Yeah, you can go fuck yourself too.) I had even sunk so low as to take out scratch paper (I can’t believe I’ve admitted that to all of you, either). And then, in a Hail Mary that I thought might at least shed some light on where to go next, I pressed “enter” on the word, which reused one of my already-green letters—B—even though I checked the rules and I couldn’t find an entry for the double-use of a letter in the same word. (*Shakes fists at the sky.*) You guessed it. Reusing the same letter turns out to be permissible, after all. And so, while my winning streak was not interrupted, my self-esteem for the day had been hijacked.

Yes, I’m talking about Wordle, the five-letter, six-attempt mystery-word game that has taken the country by storm. And which The New York Times purchased this week for a reported seven-figure sum.

That day, back in my Wordle infancy, I had found solace in the many Wordle newbies on Twitter who had had the very same experience as I had. (Some were such novices they hadn’t realized spoiler etiquette was now in effect for the game—and veteran players had all tacitly agreed not to post a literal screen shot until the next day.)

I’m no stranger to puzzles and word games. In fact, a curious quirk about me is that I often do them before bed; they usually—and bizarrely—relax my mind. I’ve never been one for the crossword. But sudoku and I go back to the early aughts (in pen, baby!). For the last decade, I have been obsessed with a puzzle called Codeword: It’s as if sudoku and crossword had a baby. In fact, it was while playing Codeword in a British publication (the sister paper to The Independent), that I learned many of the tricks of the trade: rules based on vowels; positions where certain consonants rarely appear, etc. (Oddly, I only played Codeword when I was in the U.K. Until I found their books.)

So I know a bit about the quiet satisfaction and the adrenaline rush that comes from working against the clock or a competitor to organize letters to come up with suitable or clever or perfect words.

That said, there is something slightly more propulsive about the Wordle phenomenon. And this week, as the game has made headlines on the business pages, I’ve begun to wonder why it’s become everybody’s new favorite thing to do in bed in the morning.

The craze is an obvious product of the COVID lockdown. Wordle provides a daily ritual with which to help quietly fill a bit of time and space during a pandemic whose contours seem limitless and limiting. The game, in its simplicity and elegance, lets us begin each day with a pristine grid of 30 squares and provides each player with something they can exercise control over. I can do this. On my own. I will devote the time to sit here and succeed at something. (No wonder it has also generated spin-offs or knockoffs: versions in foreign languages; even a game called Nerdle, for math whizzes.)

Wordle is also a throwback. Even though it was rolled out only last fall and is entirely digital and has a postmodern sort of sheen, it nonetheless gives off a mid-20th-century vibe. It’s quiet. It’s intuitive. It’s both quixotic and predictable. It’s polite (even when it exasperates you); it never talks back. And in its own fusty, vanilla sort of way, it’s the ultimate anti-binge entertainment option. Each episode maintains the same cast of 26 characters but they only appear once every 24 hours, unable to be streamed at will. A player has to wait, patiently, for each new Wordle word to dawn with each new day. It’s a game that parcels out its pleasures in a few minutes—not in hours. What’s more, on any given day, its game board and its hidden answer is the same for every player no matter one’s gender, age, or zip code. Talk about a common pastime, a national hearth.

Another of Wordle’s subtle attractions is that, unlike so many competitive exercises in our culture, it is fair. The same rules apply to everyone. The letters fit or they don’t. The words are right or they’re wrong. You can’t appeal a ruling or work the refs or game the game. It’s not like pro sports (stealing signs, instant-replay appeals, steroids) or the Olympics (judges, doping scandals, politics) or, well, electoral politics (super PACs, suppressing votes, “I demand we recount the recount!”). In Wordle you win or you lose, no debate, fair and square.

Yes, Wordle has its downside. To many, it feels like the absurd apotheosis of what child psychologists call “parallel play”—playmates sitting side by side but consumed by entirely separate activities. In short, it is a game in which everyone is poised over their screens, focused on the same board, yet playing alone. At a distance. Not truly interacting.

To some, it offers a new opportunity for bragging rights. One’s daily results now creep into conversations: you know, coyly dropping your numbers when you’ve had a good day. I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts someone has even posted their stats on their dating profile.

To others, it is yet another symbol of creeping capitalism. Like the World Wide Web itself, it began as a positive, connective enterprise. It brought people together. It was free and open-sourced. That is, until the Gray Lady came along this week and snapped it up. At its inception, Wordle didn’t really seem to care about making a buck. Or making a racket. Or designating a winner. Now, alas, it has gone the way of all popular games or sports in contemporary society: Larger corporate forces will soon skim profit off its player-viewers. (First, of course, it had to have its cultural baptism: appearing on SNL last month as part of a cold open.)

Because I am a die-hard, schmaltzy romantic, I think another reason it has caught on is its sweet, though not quite Cyrano-esque, origin story: A guy—named Josh Wardle, no less—invented a word game and used sequences of words to worm his way into his partner’s heart. (Talk about grand gestures.)

Truth be told, however, I like Wordle for yet another reason: its comforting duality. I like it for the action and the stasis, the suspense and the sameness.

For now, I’ll leave it at that. It’s early. And I have to get back under the covers and play.

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