Automatically Detecting Amusing Games in Wordle

TL;DR

This paper investigates the automatic prediction of user amusement in Wordle games by analyzing Reddit reactions, using GPT-3.5 for labeling, and extracting game features to predict amusement.

Contribution

It introduces a method to predict amusement in Wordle games based on Reddit reactions and game features, demonstrating a measurable aspect of humor and creativity.

Findings

GPT-3.5 labels roughly match human labels

Game features can weakly predict user amusement

Amusement in Wordle is somewhat predictable computationally

Abstract

We explore automatically predicting which Wordle games Reddit users find amusing. We scrape approximately 80k reactions by Reddit users to Wordle games from Reddit, classify the reactions as expressing amusement or not using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 using few-shot prompting, and verify that GPT-3.5's labels roughly correspond to human labels. We then extract features from Wordle games that can predict user amusement. We demonstrate that the features indeed provide a (weak) signal that predicts user amusement as predicted by GPT-3.5. Our results indicate that user amusement at Wordle games can be predicted computationally to some extent. We explore which features of the game contribute to user amusement. We find that user amusement is predictable, indicating a measurable aspect of creativity infused into Wordle games through humor.