puzzles

Sliding tiles together until they reached a number. Made in a weekend, played by everyone for a month, and still installed on the phones of people who forgot.

An app that pinged everyone at the same random moment and gave them two minutes to post an unfiltered photo, front and back camera, which was the summer of 2022's honesty experiment and the record's example of authenticity as a notification. Faded when people started waiting for a better moment.

A match-three puzzle game of sweets, lives that regenerate on a timer and a map of levels that has passed many thousands. The record's entry for the game that made 'free to play' a household phrase: in 2013 it was the most-downloaded app in the world, its requests for lives clogged Facebook, and its publisher was bought by Activision in 2016 for a sum larger than most film studios cost.

A daily puzzle of sixteen words to be sorted into four groups of four, launched by The New York Times in June 2023 as a successor to the Wordle habit and, within a year, its second most-played game. The record notes the purple category, which is always the trick, and the grid of coloured squares that people post to prove they were tricked.

Continuing to read bad news past the point of information. The rare coinage that named a behaviour people already recognised in themselves.

Pictionary by phone, fifty million downloads in fifty days, bought for $180 million in week seven. Lost five million daily users in the month after the sale, which is the fastest documented regret in this dictionary.

Fear of missing out. The rare business-school coinage that turned out to describe a real feeling.

A bird, some pipes, and one tap. Removed from sale by its author at the height of its fame because he could not bear what it was doing to people; phones with it installed briefly sold for thousands.