Real-Life Spies Troll Each Other Over Wordle

Wordle continues its gentle taking over of the world. In the days following the surprise announcement that the New York Times is buying the game for at least a million bucks, the head of the UK secret intelligence service, MI6, tweeted complaining about people’s results from the word game appearing on Twitter timelines. He was then immediately trolled by sister spy agency GCHQ.

While the complexity of the myriad UK’s spy agencies is far too boring to fully explain here, the important bit is that MI6 is the one James Bond’s from, responsible for foreign intelligence, and GCHQ is the Government Communications Headquarters, focused on providing secrets to the government and armed services. These are the real deals, the actual spies, and it seems they’re as caught up in Wordle as anyone else.

Yesterday, current head of MI6 (yes, as in ‘M’, but in real life he’s actually ‘C’) Richard Moore tweeted that he, like so many others, is a bit sick of seeing people posting their Wordle results all over Twitter. Enough that he is pondering unfollowing such accounts.

Thinking of unfollowing those who post their #Wordle results…

— Richard Moore (@ChiefMI6) February 2, 2022

It’s a common stance among curmudgeons who presumably have trouble using a mousewheel, common enough that it even drove one particularly unpleasant individual into creating a short-lived bot that used the game’s internal algorithms to spoil the next day’s results. But it’s perhaps a surprising outburst from someone you’d hope might be a little more focused on the borders of Ukraine just at the moment.

Rather brilliantly, GCHQ’s official Twitter account responded with a mocked up Wordle screenshot.

https://t.co/sEV4CXBisC pic.twitter.com/1lwOHD7tNx

— GCHQ (@GCHQ) February 2, 2022

Sadly this did not then descend into a full-on Twitter chain of all the world’s spy agencies joining in, brand-style. I wanted the FSB to drop their distributions, then the CIA to pretend they are alerted to the correct answers days in advance. Not even Wendy’s piped up (but fortunately it did take time to mock McDonald’s new monstrosity).

However, the UK’s right-wing newspaper for posh idiots, the Telegraph, did entertainingly completely fail to understand the tweet, writing an entire story about how Moore was upset at people giving “spoilers,” and his “frustration at those who reveal the answer before people are able to solve it themselves.” A story that’s still up on their site, still wrong, 24 hours later. So at least there’s that.

Meanwhile, if you want to do better at Wordle, you should take a look at Lisa Marie’s tips