C E A S E

On Friday the ninth of September, a mainstay of my life was suddenly gone. After more than four months my Wordle streak was over.

It feels important that I capture the tale of five letter word games that have somehow become such a prominent part of middle-covid times and which ideally in a few years or more will hopefully be equally as forgotten.

The first time I ever saw Wordle was at Market Street Cafe (on Market Street, near the Central Markets) in the summer of 21/22. I was waiting for an iced latte to be served and I saw a man distracting his toddler with banana bread while he typed in combinations of letters between sips of coffee. I thought to myself: hmmm, that seems like an pleasant way to enjoy a coffee. Minus the toddler part obviously.

I do like that Wordle has only one official word per day, so you can't sit there playing it over and over. That's undoubtedly a big part of its commercial success. Even escalations, like Quordle, and Sedecordle, have their one per 24 hours game modes up front ahead of their unlimited "practice" modes, and this has surely contributed to the daily impulse to play the game, keep a streak alive, make my adblocker work.

Alas, for me 2022 hasn't been all green squares or even yellow ones. And so there have been a lot of moments where I am broken or healing or isolated and in those times the mindless task of guessing five letter words brought distraction that was much nicer than sadness. I have played five letter word games when I really wished I wasn't. I have been tolerating this over winter, with the thought in the back of my mind that as soon as my Wordle streak was over I was going to go cold turkey on this game and find something more productive to do with my tram rides, coffees and shits. And then, after 143 correct guesses in a row, it happened. Now it's spring, I have a new ligament, a new king. It's time for a change. And that's the last Wordle.