Why I Cheat at Wordle: The Art of the Game

How We Got Here

You're reading the third installment of "Why I Cheat at Wordle," a short series on memory, ethics, engineering, games, and education.

In the Introduction, I told a brief story about a man I used to know who raised funds around the world for a religious school, and the trunk of note cards he used to "carry" the most important things about the thousands of people who he met on his journeys, so that he could maintain a connection with them over time. In the second part, Memory, a Love Story, I explored the limits and capabilities of our minds to tackle lists of things — like the lists of facts he recorded — and the mental (or physical) tools we can use to extend our capabilities beyond what is normally achievable.

The path we're on with these two pieces, and the third that follows today, will help us define the role of memory in intellectual pursuits.

Depending on where we stand and what we value in the pursuit, we might call a system like the one my fundraiser used "cheating," or we might call it "innovating." Similarly, we might place the inflection point between where something goes from "probably cheating" to "possibly innovating" at different places in the spectrum of the choices we might make to improve our performance, our standing, or our odds of success.

Much of this series will explore what the range of those places might be, and whether we are at all consistent in defining, judging, or living by it.

But speaking of odds and success and intellectual pursuits, let's play a little game.

The Greatest Game I Ever Played

Writing in 2023, it's easy to forget how rapidly we've progressed from the time when a "portable game" meant a weathered deck of cards, to a time when it is possible to play some of the most popular and demanding console and PC games on a device like Valve's Steam Deck, which brings fast, vivid graphics, rich audio, familiar controls, and complex gameplay that almost anyone could carry with them in a small bag or a large coat pocket almost anywhere.

There was a time before the "mid-aught's" when a portable electronic game was neither interesting nor challenging, something between a proof of concept of what was to come and a sweet diversion for bored children. Screens and controls were tiny and unfamiliar, electronic beeps passed for audio, and gameplay was either dumbed down, forgettable, or both.

For me, as an adult, Sony's introduction of the PlayStation Portable (PSP) changed all that. Although — like its predecessors and competitors — it was burdened with cartridges, it had a familiar feel and vivid graphics. It had heft and music and — most importantly, for me — it had Gunpey.

Named after Gunpei Yokoi, a Japanese video game designer and former employee of Nintendo who died in 1997. He's probably most famous, for most readers, for being the original designer of the Game Boy.

Gunpey — the game — was one of the most unique electronic puzzle games of the early 21st century. In some ways, you might compare it to Tetris, in that the objective of the game was to link elements together in a way that cleared the game board and allowed the player to advance in levels and score. Rather fitting box-based shapes together as they appeared one at a time, like in Tetris, Gunpey challenged the player to piece together broken line segments across the entire screen to create either individual or complex, branching lines that connected one end of the screen to the other. A line — or lightning-like network of lines — successfully linking one end of the screen to the other would then disappear, the player would collect points, and the gameplay and the music would both speed up, increasing the challenge and the reward.

Gunpey was the greatest game I had ever played. In the late 2000's, I'd sit on the couch in my apartment after the workday was done, with my PSP in both hands — my eyes focused and my heart racing — as the lines on the screen rose and flashed, and the tempo of the music grew feverishly, and my mind expanded to hold and shuffle all the separate segments, both the individual pieces and the longer ones I had already linked together.

As I became better and better, of course, the games got longer and longer. I remember one night I had one of the most amazing experiences in gameplay of my life. It was already fairly late and I had started playing casually, but at some point something "clicked" in a way that it had never clicked before. I was no longer struggling to play the game as a thing separate from myself: some part of the pattern of the gameplay had imprinted itself on my subconscious in a way that allowed me to intuit the arrangement and progression of the segments and lines in a way that I had never been able to before. It wasn't so much that I was able to "predict" what would happen next as that I was able — much faster than I had ever done before — to manage the all of the emergent possibilities simultaneously so that my screen was prepared, nearly optimally, for anything that the game could throw at me.

For anyone who has read China Miéville's Bas-Lag trilogy, the feeling I got that night playing Gunpey was similar to how Miéville described Uther Doul's "Possibility Sword." I had never experienced gameplay at this level. I drew deeper and deeper into the game; the music got louder and faster; I was moving so rapidly that it felt like both my heart and my breath were standing still. As the game progressed through the night — hour after hour, level after level — I could see, out of the corner of my eye, the controls moving underneath my thumbs so fast that I thought, surely, that what I had achieved was impossible.

Of course, it was at that moment that I realized that it was.

I looked at my hands and the handheld, the sharp lines and the vivid screen, and I realized that somehow I had fallen asleep in the middle of the game and not noticed that I had slipped from the real world into a dream world. The hours that I had spent over those months so engrossed in play had been able to imprint the pattern and logic and physical and physiological experience of the gameplay on my subconscious so accurately that I was not able to remember the moment when I had left the world behind and entered a deep and solitary prison in my own mind.

Having realized I was asleep, I willed myself awake. I collected the fallen handheld from the couch next to me, and walked with it to the bedroom where I sealed it in a black plastic zippered pouch and placed it in the back of my nightstand drawer.

I have not unzipped it since.

The Nature of Great Software, and the Nature of Rules

We'll have time later in this series to explore what makes great software, and what made Gunpey a great game.

For now, let's say only that some of the chemistry that makes the brain so remarkable — and human beings capable of such great achievements — make us extremely vulnerable as well. The same chemicals that drive our species to greatness addict us too. Our brains crave the danger and stimulation of the times we no longer remember, and so we construct conflicts and pastimes that fill those voids. Whether we are standing at our seats screaming for a victory in the playoffs, scheming in boardrooms, or climbing cliff faces, our brains thrive on the conflict and the competion, the taste of victory, and the danger of losing it all.

As a species, we are explorers by nature. We are not meant to live shallow, safe, or pampered lives. We are built to confront the world in all of its rawness and danger, to feel fear, to fight nature — to go, as it has been said, "where no one has gone before." We have conquered nearly every environment on earth not really because we are so talented, or even so methodical, but because, above all else, we are intrepid.

Great games are a window into this more primitive world — a world with wild things bigger and fiercer and hungrier than ourselves — where the risks come at a steadily increasing beat and the simplest reward is continued survival.

We construct rules around games for a reason, because it is in the context of rules that our victories and losses have meaning. Rules define fairness and rules define cheating. Rules allow us to isolate the skills and training that we are testing into their purest form, so that we can evaluate how good we are inside a well-defined and unchanging framework. At least, that is what we say, even though it is not how any game or sport actually works.

But if that isn't actually the purpose of rules, why would we lie to ourselves about such a significant thing?

Oh, the Places We Will Go

So far in this series, we have introduced three themes: the nature of the mind and how we model the world; ethics and honesty and what it means to act fairly, and now — with this installment — defining what makes a great game, what makes great software, and what it means whether, when, and how we "cheat" at both.

It may seem that we have drifted a little far from our story, but there is a lot yet to come, and few places on earth better suited to bring together the threads and musical voices of lists, games, money and ethics, mind tricks, and dopamine drips than the vast network of oxygen bars colloquially known as the Las Vegas Strip.