I’ve described wyfio as a cryptic puzzle and online riddle. I think this has some minor descriptive utility as you get the gist of the site should you accidentally stumble upon it in a search result. That is, compared to just ‘wyfio’. But as a long-tail keyword it’s turned out to be next to useless. Breaking it down into its component parts hasn’t been wildly helpful either. Cryptic largely translates to crossword, puzzles are jigsaws and riddles are a kind of feedstock for content farms. Perhaps then, I need a better description. But what?
Notpron, as probably the most pre-eminent game in the ‘genre’, was self-described as ‘the hardest riddle available on the internet’ and is noted on wikipedia as being an ‘online puzzle game’ and ‘Internet riddle’ whilst simultaneously falling under the impossibly broad genre of ‘puzzle game’. For my purposes, ‘Internet riddle’ is the most interesting term here. Whilst serving up the obligatory ad funnel content, it also includes results for Cicada 3301 (vaguely ‘online riddle’ adjacent) and a forum post referencing a previous title ‘404 Riddles: An Internet Riddle’. This includes a response making comparisons of that very clever title to Notpron and OddPawn as well as describing those games as ‘digital scavenger hunts’ with a research element. This rings true for wyfio too.
Turning to something more contemporary, Hakari.io - which stays in my mind having launched at a similar time - describes itself as a ‘multidisciplinary puzzle game’. This generated a rich and varied search return (acid-base poker anyone?). Unfortunately though, none of those results, as far as I can tell, lead to any ‘online riddle’ (excepting “exact phrase” searching).
Returning to wyfio itself then, the Mystery League newsletter, described our 'expansive collection' of puzzles as ‘further along...the enigmatic spectrum’ with ‘puzzles that obfuscate the bounds of the puzzle and the puzzle experience as much as possible’. The enigmatic puzzle angle here is good – leading straight to the most comprehensive index of online riddles I know of at enigmatics.org who, incidentally, use the phrase ‘internet puzzles’. In relation to the point on ‘obfuscation’, I’ll note that I see it more as an opening up to potential rather than a hiding away of bounds. Besides, I suspect that 'wyfio: puzzles that obfuscate the bounds of the puzzle and the puzzle experience as much as possible' would be unlikely to work.
Elsewhere, wyfio has been described as comprising ‘lateral thinking puzzles’ and as ‘edutainment’. In the case of lateral thinking I think that it is broadly true. And I hope is at least partly true in relation to edutainment. In conversation, I’ve also heard people refer to wyfio as a ‘web puzzle’ – but none of these really seem like better options. So how to describe wyfio, succinctly, in a way that works for SEO?
Not solved...yet :)