Record Column: The Flap About Flappy Bird

Flappy Bird, from .GEARS Studios.
(Courtesy Product-Reviews.net)

It seemed to come from nowhere, but be everywhere around me. I knew nothing about it, barely understood the few vague details I could catch. And then, I hardly remember how it happened, but I ended up with it myself. On my phone, that is.

Flappy Bird. It’s called Flappy Bird. The hottest video game on Earth. Featured in Time, declared “a cultural phenomenon” by Forbes, proclaimed by CNET (in bold type) as “the embodiment of our descent into madness.” Those who know it, know it well. Those who don’t, well, those who don’t are the lucky ones. There are always those lucky few who remain immune to any proper affliction, and I argue that Flappy Bird should seem such an exact thing, rearing up all around from nowhere to bowl us over as it did.

To me, it might just be the most successful media product in recent memory. I struggled with that last sentence; I almost wanted to say “media campaign,” but there was no commercial hype behind Flappy Bird; then I thought about using “media release,” but the game actually dropped in the App Store last May, so “release” didn’t quite seem appropriate, either. That really testifies to the magnitude of Flappy Bird’s success, too: that an odd, pointless game, from a mysterious one-man developer in Vietnam, would suddenly rise up from complete obscurity almost a year after its creation.

So many of the game’s general characteristics—mind-numbingly simple and absolutely free, yet unbelievably frustrating—are certainly anything but unique, and yet somehow it has unequivocally become the mobile phone world’s meme of the moment.

I can’t help but wonder what exactly so fascinates people about this game that they would start to download it in droves. Calling it simple really doesn’t do any justice: you try to fly a little pixelated bird through pipes. Tap the screen keep the bird afloat. Touch the pipes, or the ground, and, the bird drops dead. Game over. That’s all there is to it. No end goal; no storyline. No power-ups, or upgrades, or un-lockable content. Just a cheaply-rendered bird and some green pipes that seem stolen from an old Mario game.

And that’s not even the strangest part: people have spent hours of their lives playing this game, mostly spent in crippling frustration, endless vain attempts at surpassing a high score. And for many, the bar isn’t even set that high: the internet-average score seems to be around seven; a friend and colleague of mine here at the paper (name withheld to spare undue embarrassment) admits having never managed to pass more than three pipes. Getting into the mid-teens is widely viewed as a respectable accomplishment, and the thirties as an impressive feat of skill.

Of course, there are always exceptions to such mundane talent. Over lunch last week, a friend told me of how he attained a score of 192. “Sometimes I feel like I’m only good at useless things,” he starts telling me, when I wheeled around in my seat. I heard it, again; the ringing noise the game makes when the bird makes it through a pipe. A horrifying sound, it emanates from all around, piercing through the usual buzz of conversation as if for the sole purpose of my own misery. I’ve heard it out to eat with friends after 10:00. I’ve heard it on trains back from Chicago (“What’s your highest score, anyways?” one person behind me asks a friend. “Six.” “Four,” says a third. Another chimes in, “I got past thirty, once.” “It’s weird, it’s just so addicting.”). I can’t begin to comprehend how they can put up with it right in front of them; it’s not like the game makes any important sounds.

I know that if I had left my sound on all this time, that ringing would have all but driven me insane; that’s how much time I’ve invested into this enterprise. I remember a game that came out a few years ago called Skyrim, an open-ended dragon-slaying fantast sort of thing, and there were people who spent days in solitude playing it; it became a near-substitute for reality to them. To Skyrim superior software to Flappy Bird is a wild understatement, yet it never really did much for me; I think I’ve played less of it in two years than I have played Flappy Bird in a matter of two weeks.

I can at least say with some confidence that I have gained something for my time and trouble; after humble beginnings that saw great struggle to even pass five, I can report that I not only progressed through the teens and twenties and into the thirties, but that I honed my skills and gradually worked my way to current peak of eighty-six, an anecdotal ranking that somehow at once is both a sign of too much time wasted as well as a figure that commands some odd measure of prestige.

And I realized something along the way, knowledge that came to me as I began to recognize the fundamentals that allowed for advancement through some of the farthest reaches of pipework. Other, more complex games may serve as a virtual reality, a sort alternative to real life.

Flappy Bird, on the other hand, is something entirely different: it is a rough metaphor for life, or so it seems to me. Some of us go farther than others, some of us fizzle out. Some of us get stuck in ruts, others keep going on into uncharted territory. Success requires both luck to encounter favorable terrain, and the skill to traverse it. Timing will often be everything, though sometimes we won’t be able to help but get caught up and clip the side of a pipe, just as we find ourselves on the cusp of greatness. Inevitably, fate will catch up to us and we will finally drop; when we do, it will be what we’ve left behind that survives us.

And so many of us will keep on at it, with this game, in search of something and finding almost nothing; sure, we’ll name numerical goals for some score that we want to beat, and we might get there eventually. And then someday, when the passage of time finally washes Flappy Bird away, we’ll look back in wonder and amazement at the journey we’ve just taken towards a useless final score.

Ironically, those of us who were fooled by the cheap and minimalist design into taking Flappy Bird for less than it is are not the only ones who have been driven mad. Dong Nguyen, the mysterious creator and the mind behind the one-man .GEARS Studios announced last weekend via Twitter that “I cannot take this anymore,” and promptly removed the game from the App Store and Google Play, apparently tired of the intense media attention surrounding the rapid rise of Flappy Bird. As of now, he’s believed to be making $50,000 a day in ad revenue.

However, if Mr. Nguyen wanted to kill off his Frankenstein’s Monster immediately, and be done with it, I fear he may have acted just a bit too late. If anything, he’s bound to receive even more curious tweets, with the world now wondering about the future of his software. That is, of course, if those who would ask can find the time to quit tapping to flap and switch apps. Quarantine is little help for the infected; for those of us who had already downloaded long before, the app still opens and functions normally, and life goes on.  

During one session of flights, I happened to notice that the ad up at the top of the screen was one of those “meet hot singles in your area” things; a line of smaller-than-thumbnail images of women beamed at me, with “Meet Me,” “Meet Me,” “Meet Me,” “Meet Me” written under all of them. I couldn’t help but laugh, and smirk at them. “Can’t you tell,” I think to myself, as though I can communicate with these pictures through some sort of telekinesis powers, “that I’m too busy flying through pipes right now to be bothered with meeting any of you?”

I push the little green play button to start over again; this time it seems I’ll be a blue bird fluttering through a night sky…until I clip a pipe and drop to the floor, only to repeat the process again, and then again. Red birds, yellow birds; day and night; over and over. More frustrated tweets are to come, I’m sure. I don’t doubt I’ll be hearing that torturous ding for some time. I’ll top my own score now and again a few more times, only to find someone still five times better, before this all might possibly fade away. That’s life, really; “Some will win, some will lose/Some were born to sing the blues/Oh, the movie never ends/It goes on and on and on and on…”

-Mitch Carter is an Illinois State Scholar and an Associate Member of the Kendall County Young Republicans.

@CartersCornerPR