In a Flap with Flappy Bird

Statistically speaking, there’s a decent chance you’ve got Flappy Bird on your smartphone right now. The latest in a long line of short-lived mobile game phenomenons (that wailing you hear is a million abandoned Draw Something chains crying out), Flappy Bird was actually released by developer Dong Nguyen in May of last year – it’s only recently that it’s soared to 50 million downloads across iOS and Android.

The actual reason it accrued those installs is a bit of a mystery – whether it was a huge marketing push, bots downloading the app over and over, word of mouth or dark magic, no one’s quite sure what made it soar to the top of the App Store and Google Play charts.

If I was cynical man (oh wait, I am!) I’d say it probably had something to do with it being free and having Bird in the title. I don’t know if you heard, but birds are pretty serious business on the App Store. So when Nguyen took the app down from the App Store a couple of days ago, citing that he couldn’t take the pressure any more, the world went a little bit mad; endless clones were instantly released in its place, and iPhones with Flappy Bird installed are selling on eBay for millions (which reminds me, I’m due an upgrade…).

It’s hard not to scoff at Flappy Bird at first. The whole thing feels like the result of the tutorial project of a game builder program. No music to speak of – just a couple of royalty-free sound effects to flesh out the experience. The UI is chunky and inelegant, but the art assets are familiar; the iconic green pipes and the beige ground with a green bar of grass are different enough that it can’t be accused of directly plagiarising Super Mario World, but are close enough that it can’t be a coincidence. If it hadn’t been taken down, I wouldn’t have been surprised if we saw an update that completely overhauled the look of the game to stop Nintendo’s lawyers from jumping on Nguyen’s head.

As a piece of game design, Flappy Bird is basic. You tap the screen to keep a bird in the air and navigate it through the gaps in a gauntlet of pipes extruding from the top and bottom of the screen. Each pipe you pass is worth one point, and the objective is to score as many points as you can before you hit something. That’s IT. There’s no difficulty settings (except HARD AS NAILS, but I’ll get to that), no alternative modes or levels. The lack of features is particularly conspicuous.

Part of the reason it got so popular can probably be attributed to that simplicity. It’s a free game where the concept is grasped in the first ten seconds, so there’s pretty much no barrier to entry.

Remember when Snake on the Nokia 3210 was the height of mobile gaming? Flappy Bird is pure ‘pick-up-and-play’ in the same way. Easy to get into, but difficult to tear yourself away from. You’ll play a round, get to a certain number of points and think ‘I can do better than that’ – luckily, a retry is only two taps away.

It’s made too easy to spiral into that all important compulsion loop; flap through some pipes, crash, go again. Repeat until your battery runs flat. The impetus to keep trying is fuelled by the gameplay which is, whether the developer meant it to be or not, obnoxiously difficult. The bird’s hitbox is unfairly large, meaning that you can collide with a pipe that the bird didn’t actually touch and it makes judging when to tap as you arc between a pipe hard. Making it to your highest score – that one, glorious run where you glided through perfectly - proves an elusive feat to repeat.

Old tricks

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book to make a game artificially difficult, but crucially for Flappy Bird the challenge is not insurmountable – it’s not fair either, but you can do it if you’re skilled enough. You keep playing because you’re subconsciously telling yourself that it’s easy, and when you eventually do beat your high score you’re euphoric – potentially hours of build-up lead to that one magical attempt.

Competition isn’t built into the mechanics, but it’s encouraged. It’s only got that one mode, so there’s a level playing field and it’s easy to get into contests with your friends – if you tell them you’ve got a number of points on Flappy Bird, because they’ve all experienced the same thing they’ll know what a rad dude you are (or look at you funny).

It’s also refreshing, in a free-to-play games market mired in microtransactions, energy mechanics and premium currencies, to play a game that eschews all of that (although there is an ad bar across the top which was generating a cool $50k a day in revenue at the time of writing, which I can only assume is down to people accidentally tapping it during particularly frenzied play. Presumably, that ad bar still works).

Although I admired Flappy Bird for providing a compelling gameplay experience, the fact that it was wrapped in such cynical and derivative presentation (that, and a nagging feeling that I’ve played this before, somewhere)makes it feel more disposable and fleeting than it deserved to be. But it undoubtedly tapped into something with people, and I like to think that it was down to a product doing the thing it was good at very well.

Never mind, eh? Back to flinging birds at pigs in poorly-constructed shacks.