'Parer' broke 60 percent of all Wordle streaks on one day
If you played Wordle religiously through 2022, you might remember one particularly rough day's answer: Parer.
This turned out to be the most difficult word of the year, in part thanks to its use of a recurring 'r', but a GDC talk yesterday from Zoe Bell, the New York Times' executive producer of games, revealed it broke a particularly whopping amount of streaks.
Typically, Bell explained, showing a chart that tracked players' streak breaks over time, «15 percent of people break their streak on a given day — except that one day, with 'parer', where almost 60 percent of people broke their streak.»
When parer came up «we all groaned,» she joked, as it was what she called a bit of a «skyscraper word — because you end up with what looks like tall buildings on your board as you can't get that last letter, because of all the possible options.»
The rest of Bell's talk was a great listen — she noted that Wordle's «mere existence» in the New York Times' games portfolio caused their other games' daily active users to shoot upwards. The addition of that little prompt to try out Spelling Bee, another word-based puzzle game, on Wordle's end-game screen actually doubled Spelling Bee's users, while 35 percent of new subscribers to the New York Times' games section cited Wordle as the reason.
Bell also talked about the Times' «first, do no harm» approach to Wordle after they bought it from its original creator, Josh Wardle, describing its viral success as «lightning in a bottle, and we did not want to let it out,» while also acknowledging that they knew its users would peak at some point. She also showed a graph highlighting its now levelled-out interest as noticeably higher than other viral hits like Pokémon Go.
She also acknowledged a
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