It may only be Springtime, but if 2022's popular culture is remembered for anything, it will be the addictive online game Wordle. The idea is simple - players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with feedback given for each guess in the form of coloured tiles indicating when letters match or occupy the correct position.
Such is the popularity of the game that several spin-offs have been created including versions where you have to solve four Wordles simultaneously (Quordle), identify a bird from its outline (Birdle), identify a country from its outline (Worldle), identify a song from short audio clues (Heardle), identify a former Foreign Secretary from their outline (Hurdle) and where you have to identify Vladimir Putin (Turdle).
The latest to jump on the bandwagon is our own Bodleian Library, which released their version - 'Bodle' - this morning. Players have six attempts to guess the catalogue number of one of the 13 million books in their collection. The first design saw the librarian submitting players’ answers via a pneumatic tube to a machine known as The Bodley Function (pictured below). The score would shoot right back the next day.
The Bodley Function
Following feedback, the library has re-launched the game but with a high-speed interactive twist: students can now play from anywhere in the world by faxing their answers to the library. Head of games and youth engagement at the Bodleian Library, Marcus Downe-Wythit, hopes that the game will attract more young people to the world-famous library. He said "When the Bodleian Library was founded in 1602 it was the Ask Jeeves of its day so it's no surprise to see us near the forefront of technology."
Asked whether he was hoping to inspire enterprising undergraduates to take the Bodle format and create their own versions, Dr Downe-Wythit said that he was aware of some Mathematics students making a version where people have to identify a book from its outline. The game is to be called 'Rectangle'.
Other plans in the Bodleian pipeline include a photo sharing app to rival Instagram, named 'Radcliffe Camera' and to convert Shakespeare's first folio into an NFT.
The Bodleian pipeline
