The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has released Artle, a new version of Wordle. Artle is an image-based, art-historical variant of the game.
The mechanics of the game are similar to Wordle but in an art form. Instead of guessing a five-letter word, Artle players are shown a set of four artworks from the museum’s 155,000 works by 15,000 artists and have four chances to guess who created them. If the player cannot correctly guess the answer four times, the answer will be revealed. The set of artworks provided resets and changes daily.
According to Steven Garbarino, the museum’s senior product manager, the gallery intends to “create an experience that would encourage audiences to learn about art in a fun, unique way.”
Artle, according to Garbarino, is a short daily mind teaser. However, the discovery is more important than the problem. He also mentioned that Artle players aren’t put off by a challenge; in fact, when they don’t know the answer, they’re twice as likely to click through to discover more about an artist. “At the end, you can click through to learn more about the artist and artworks and continue exploring to prepare yourself for future Artles.”
The goal of Artle is not to know every great artwork just by looking at it but to introduce the people to art that they may not have seen before and to build an appreciation for art.
The original Wordle game was initially invented by software engineer Josh Wardle for his partner, but it is now owned by The New York Times after the publication bought the game in late January.
Shortly after Wordle started taking the internet by storm, others who have enjoyed the game have also developed their own versions and twists to the word-guessing game. There’s Worldle, a geography-based game, Heardle (guessing the song title based on the snippets of a song), Nerdle (guessing math computations), Queerdle (guessing LGBTQ+ terms and lingo), Absurdle (a more intense version of Wordle), Framed (guessing the movie based on frames and movie stills) and many others.
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