Description: Scott W. Baker: Chaos out of Chaos
Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve probably noticed the scaly, green and yellow rash that has been infecting the social media of your friends and family. No, it’s not the latest Covid variant, it’s the brag posts for the latest word game craze: Wordle. I wasn’t in the first wave of Wordle enthusiasts, but I glommed on as soon as I realized what the squares meant; I had played a similar word game as a kid and the nostalgia was welcome.
For the uninitiated, Wordle is a word puzzle where you’re trying to guess a five-letter word. You get six tries, all of which are proper five-letter words. (No guessing AEIOU.) For each letter in your guess, it shows you whether it’s in correct (green), in the word but in the wrong space (yellow) or not part of the target word (gray). The fewer guesses it takes, the bigger the brag you get to post to Twitter or Facebook or wherever. It’s one word a day and everyone gets the same word. So yes, the cheaters c
If you’ve played the old colored peg game Mastermind, you probably get the gist. More directly, it’s like the early 2000’s Chuck Woolery game show from the Game Show Network called Lingo. (Yes, there was an iteration before that filmed in Vancouver, but I never saw that one and it didn’t have Shandi.) Teams of two players would try to guess five letter words given the first letter. Similar markings were used for accurate and wrong-place letters. There was a bingo component included in some show iterations…b