Mollywood BLVD
MOLLY PENNY Molly Penny is a local radio personality and MNSU alum. It was her love of pop culture that got her interested in doing a radio show for KOWZ 100.9, and she is now the music and promotions director at KOWZ & KRUE Radio in Owatonna. She resides in Mankato with her movie buff husband and YouTube obsessed children. Catch her on Twitter at @ mollyhoodUSA.
What the W O R D L E needs now
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hat in the world is Wordle? From Farmville to Trivia Crack, social media has propelled many games to popularity. You may have noticed your friends forming a secret social media society with symbolism containing colored boxes of grey green and yellow along with numbers like “Wordle 241 4/6.” If you never bothered to ask or investigate, let me explain: Wordle is a new app game that is taking the internet by storm. We saw the trend creeping up early this year and its popularity is still rising. It went from dozens of players to hundreds of thousands in a few short months. Remember Words With Friends? It’s kind of like that, but without the friends. The basic premise of the online game, created by software engineer Josh Wardle and now hosted by the New York Times, is that each day a new word puzzle is presented. Every 24 hours, users have a chance to guess the 5-letter word. You start by taking a shot in the dark and typing a guess word. If a letter is in the word but in the incorrect place, that box turns yellow. If the letter is the correct letter in the correct place, the box will turn green. Any letters not contained in the word of the day are grayed out. Wordle players get 6 chances to guess the word correctly. Each trial word entered gets you closer to uncovering the correct word. If you play the game, you already know all this, but what you may not know is that while your Wordle posts may be annoying to your social media followers, it is actually very good for your brain. Research shows that word games in general, like crossword or Sudoku, improve your cognitive skills. Those who have been taking
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a daily stab at Wordle may experience increased focus, memory and more! I will admit my FOMO kicked into high gear with this but as of now I am in the control group, aka those who have yet to download the game that is sweeping the internet. Wordle now touts around 10 million participants. By now, those of us on Facebook have certainly been exposed to the game. In
fact, those of us in the Midwest have been inundated by it. An education site, Schoolauthority.com, compiled Twitter data and after studying more than 2 million tweets about Wordle found that Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, is the No. 1 state for the viral game! You can chalk that up to the fact that we live in
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an arctic tundra (or perhaps our superior mental aptitude). The second and third Wordle obsessed states according to the data are Wisconsin and Iowa. There have already been a few fun spin-offs to the Wordle fad. If you are having trouble getting on the Wordle bandwagon, there is a version geared towards potty mouths. This alternative is called Lewdle. It is played exactly the same as Wordle but contains only x-rated words. When you guess the correct word, the game offers praise like, “You’d get detention for that one!” We have embarked on Lewdle here at the office and it is extremely entertaining. Not to brag but I got one in two tries. If foul language is not your thing, there is yet another game that mimics Wordle for the mathletes among us: Nerdle. Instead of words, it is a daily numbers game that contains math problems — count me out on that one; math is definitely not my strong suit. I think that one of the most interesting things about it is that nowhere in the sea of Facebook and Twitter posts about the day’s word have I seen a spoiler. In fact, one Twitter user, Sarah Bessey, exclaimed, “The social contract we are all upholding not to spoil the day’s Wordle has slightly restored my faith in humanity.” Perfectly stated, Sarah! It really is an unspoken rule that you do not spoil the game for others, and I am shocked that we have managed to keep this up for so long. Spoilers are rampant when it comes to just about everything else from binge watched television shows to movie reviews. In fact, there was a Wordle spoiling bot able to get into the game’s source code to retrieve the answers that was taken down by Twitter immediately. I wonder how long this anomaly of Wordle non-spoiler solidarity will last? I have already noticed a few of my friends making clever puns along with their Wordle of the day posts, which, while they are not overt spoilers, could potentially tip-off the word of the day if people are paying close attention. It has been enough to make me contemplate playing the game, but so far, I have managed to hold out. Heck, I don’t even have Tik Tok on my phone. Plus, I am already annoying enough on social media, the last thing I need to subject my followers to is me bragging about how little tries it took for me to guess the word of the day. The good thing about this is once you have guessed the word, you must wait 24 hours to play again, so it’s not the time suck that many games and entertainment apps tend to be. I can only imagine what the future holds for Wordle. This is America… Is it even a real trend if we don’t capitalize on it to the max? I foresee board games, apparel, slap bracelets, maybe a song and most definitely some sort of show or movie. Remember when they made an Angry Birds movie, and the Emoji movie? By my lights, it is just a matter of time before someone makes a Wordle movie or at least a limited run Netflix mini-series. Mark my words, it will happen. Maybe I should have my film director husband write a screenplay and pitch it! BRB, ‘bout to strike it rich!
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