Psychology experts explain the sudden obsession with Wordle, a simple word game that has taken over the internet

• Wordle has become the first viral game of 2022, with millions of players sharing their daily scores.
• The simple puzzle can only be played once a day, and it wasn't originally made for mass consumption.

At the start of 2022, images of green and yellow squares began cropping up on Twitter. The screenshots were from Wordle, a simple puzzle game that the internet had fallen head over heels for.

For anyone not familiar with the online game, the aim of Wordle is to guess a five-letter word in six tries. If you guess the right letter in the right place, the tile turns green. If it's the right letter in the wrong place, it turns yellow. A gray tile means the letter isn't in the word at all.

The game had humble beginnings. The New York Times reported that Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, designed the game as something for him and his partner to play. In October, he released the game to the masses. By mid-January, The Guardian reported, the game had 2 million players.

British psychologist Lee Chambers, who specializes in environmental and well-being coaching, told Insider that Wordle was so appealing because it stimulated both the language- and logic-processing areas of our brains. Like all games, it also leads to a release of dopamine, a hormone that allows us to feel pleasure and satisfaction.

Wordle is far from the first game to go viral. Farmville and Candy Crush dominated Facebook feeds in the early 2010s, while Houseparty and Animal Crossing were everywhere in the early days of the pandemic.

But there are a few things that set Wordle apart. Firstly, you only need a web browser to play — there are no gaming consoles to buy or apps to download. Secondly, you only get one puzzle a day. Once you've guessed the word, you won't get another until after midnight.

Insider spoke with experts to find out how these unique factors, along with perfect timing, led to the first viral gaming sensation of 2022.

Wordle's creator made it extremely shareable

Wardle told the New York Times that he added a score-sharing option in mid-December when he noticed that players were manually typing out their results using emojis. The automated option allows players to post their scores, along with a visual representation of the path they took to guessing the word, on Twitter without disclosing what the word of the day is. This helped to create a sense of community around the game.

"The posts are instantly recognizable, so whether or not you've done today's challenge, you feel like you're part of the game," said Juliet Landau-Pope, a social scientist and productivity coach.

Chambers believed the game's unique shareability was key to its online popularity.

"Constantly seeing the squares in our Twitter feed indicates that there is something to be solved, and others are on the case," Chambers said. "It pulls us into investigating it ourselves."

The aesthetics may play a part, too, Chambers explained, saying the colored blocks can be soothing as they "bring a comforting level of psychological order even when surrounded by chaos."

Its simplicity also makes it perfect fodder for memes, which have begun to flood Twitter and seem to resonate with people, which creates even more buzz around the game.

One user likened the Wordle blocks to the shipping containers on the boat that was trapped in the Suez Canal, while others turned the Wordle blocks into common imagery and created relatable posts about playing.

Twitter user @traceyfanclub even started immortalizing her Wordle scores in a cross-stitch, with one follower saying that was the tweet that finally made her play the game.

The game's functionality leads to a sense of connectedness

One of the key differentiators of Wordle is that players across the globe are all guessing the same word on the same day.

"The fact that we are all trying to solve the same puzzle brings us together, helping us feel like we are tackling a bigger problem together," Chambers said.

The collective experience also feeds into our competitive streak. Harrison Gowland, a video-game developer, said he didn't share the results for other online games he played. But with Wordle, he felt the desire to do so.

"There's both a sense of community in terms of 'How difficult did people find it this time?' and a competitive angle in terms of 'How well did I stack up in finding this word compared to everyone else?'" he said.

Gowland believed that part of the motivation came from a sense of peer pressure, of not wanting to be left out and seem like you're missing out on a viral trend.

Landau-Pope said this sense of community helped to counter the loneliness that many of us felt online and in real life, "especially in these dark winter months."

It created a wholesome distraction at the perfect time

Unlike lots of online games, Wordle can only be played once a day, so it has few of the pitfalls of being addictive that other online games can have. "It's a very smart product because people know that if they get hooked, they can't waste more than a few moments each day," Landau-Pope said.

Timing may have also been key to Wordle's success, Chambers said. Because the Wordle puzzles are numbered with a daily counter, they can help anchor us to the day of the week, as our perception of time has been affected by pandemic restrictions and remote working, especially during the holiday period.

Landau-Pope said its sense of wholesome connectedness could be exactly what we were looking for at the time it blew up. She explained that the period before a new year was a time for reflection, and this past year might have been especially difficult for people.

"Within all the political discontent, economic uncertainty, ongoing health crises, there's a dearth of good news on social media," Landau-Pope added. "Wordle has given us all something fun to focus on, if only for a few moments of the day."

For more stories like this, check out coverage from Insider's Digital Culture team here.