Many of Mediacells friends and competitors have been predicting developments in the new-tech arenas but all this has been overshadowed by a very human story today and perhaps sets the narrative tone for 2022.
Even the nostalgic, rags to riches success story of Bobby Kotic’s Activision, a brand saved from the 1980s arcade game scrapheap for $500k back in 1990 and sold this year to Microsoft for $68.7 billion couldn’t cut through to normal people like the news that Wordle, a homemade web game, has been acquired by the New York Times.
Yesterday’s Sony Interactive Entertainment deal for shooter video gamemaker Bungie for $3.6 billion was put in the shade by a five-letter, six tries word game based on code that has been around for half a century.
Already nostalgic sentiment for the ‘simple, pure, elegant’ mystery word game is trending with some velocity on social media.
Gamification experts, like Toby Beresford, have unpacked the gaming experience around Wordle and determined that its good-addiction qualities are predicated on something called ‘enforced scarcity’, which is a kind of posh delayed gratification apparently.
Gen-Z purists are already lamenting the end of puzzle-a-days – now that the free game has been snapped up by a media owner who will inevitably shunt the game behind a paywall, a paywordle.
Read the full article at New Digital Age