News of Flappy Bird’s existence first came to me via a series of wry high-score tweets: 3 ... 7 ... 2. Players reaching double figures were accused of harnessing occult forces. Naturally I was intrigued, though it was a curiosity tempered by the fact I had no idea how the score was calculated or what it meant, and by my disappointment in other “hard fun” games like Super Meat Boy and QWOP. Especially QWOP.
It wasn’t until I read reports of the little two meg brain-boiler raking in fifty thousand clams a day in advertising revenue that I decided to check it out. It appealed to my sense of humour: an unplayable game making millions. Though, after a few minutes of abortive tapping, I adjusted my smirk into a wry smile and hit the home key, satisfied that I was across the curio du jour; that there was nothing more to see.
And in a literal sense, there wasn’t - as far as I know. I’ve heard rumours of cake, but haven’t come across any. Just pipes. A solar cycle. A palette of plumage. Nonetheless, I went back for more; improved a little; hit double figures. And with a good hour of flapping under my belt, I realised that there was more to Flappy than meets the eye.
For the uninitiated, the eponymous Flappy Bird is a rotund, Groening-esque cartoon avianoid which ascends when you tap the screen, and drops like a stone once its skyward momentum is exhausted (a heartbeat later). This jaunty, parabolic style must be used to guide it between gaps in lengths of some rather familiar green plumbing. Tap too early and you’ll hit a stalacpipe - leave it too late and you’ll eat iron. About as simple as it gets, yet through such simplicity, Flappy dangles a tasty carrot before our gaming snouts: a tiny margin for error combined with skill-based reward.
Groening-esque indeed.
There’s no luck in Flappy Bird, good or bad; variance, sure, but no unavoidable bullets plugging us, or being in the right place at the right time. And the controls are tight. Essentially, the game presents a straightforward challenge, equips us with the ability to meet it, teaches us how to use it via an arcade infographic, and leaves us to suffer - something we’re happy to do given the clarity of our objective (a new high score), and the fact that success or failure is just a few seconds away.
The beauty of such simple yet functionally devious gameplay is that it requires the player to invest it with meaning. It’s akin to the cushioned shoes which allowed us to start running marathons, or the crampons which enabled us to ascend the highest peaks - the point of such activities being the achievement of something uncommonly difficult; to provide answers to questions of fortitude. Flappy Bird is about taking the next step and the next step and the one after that, towards an ever rising summit. One step is simple, but a hundred? In essence, it’s about not slipping up. And when we do, the whip-crack sound effect accompanies the knowledge that we only have ourselves to blame.
As I sank deeper into the Flappy-hole, I realised that the game wasn’t merely a successful testing chamber, but an affectionate and witty homage to platform games - not merely in terms of the pixel-grazing tension, but by way of the sentimental bond established between player and character.
The overall Super Mario World look is more than a superficial reference to the moustachioed one. It’s a reminder of the time that being hopelessly underpowered and inelegant was par for the course. It’s no surprise that our yen for balletic carnage has been indulged as technology has progressed, but playing gods of war is only one type of role, with its own limitations - a design which privileges the flow of cinematic action over progress-sapping breaks, for instance.
Mario sits at the other end of the spectrum. He’s slow, feeble, jumps like a cricket after a dose of Raid, wields fireballs in a largely incombustible world, and flies like a six year-old’s kite. Yet we love him in spite of his flaws. Or, more to the point, because of them. Every video game is a complex world of cause and effect, and Nintendo propped up its corner of the big top with a stable of characters who needed to be guided toward their goal with tactical thought and surgical precision, rather than launched there in the wake of singing blades and hot lead.
Pitch perfect controls... and challenge.
The typical Nintendo protagonist brings to mind the “defective detective” of hardboiled fiction. From Sherlock Holmes to Lisbeth Salander, the genre has romanticised the socially inept, physically hampered, and emotionally scarred as having gained from their failure to meet mainstream expectations - at least insofar as detective work goes - its mass appeal founded on the fact that being vulnerable to a dangerous world which seeks to oppress the truth is a scenario which everyone can relate to, even if the dangers we face usually aren’t mortal ones.
As a character, Flappy Bird’s look and movement might appear to have been intended as the proverbial red rag to a bull, but if frustration and anger were all anyone felt, the game would never have cemented its place in pop culture. Aside from the game as a phenomenon, however, its intentionally clumsy, unforgiving nature provides nostalgic insight into a couple of the core elements of old school gaming: the powerful lure of an unambiguous test, and the sympathetic quality of characters who don’t appear to be equal to the task.
What I love about Flappy Bird is that there’s nowhere to hide. The sole aim is survival, moment to moment, for the duration of each game. Every obstacle presents the opportunity to better your score by an increment of one, or fail completely. I think it’s fair to say that as games have become more sophisticated - more like cinematic role-playing than circumscribed trials - these straightforward do-or-die stakes have been pushed to the margins. As a consequence, a genuinely difficult game caused a sensation, much in the same way that Flappy’s big-budget cousins, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls have. The tales are woe are strikingly familiar: “It’s impossible. Absurd. I can’t put it down.”
Mere moments before death in Dark Souls. (This caption can be applied to ANY Dark Souls screenshot btw.)
Given the success of such games, large and small, I wonder whether gruelling difficulty is back on the menu. Flappy Bird’s creator withdrew the game from the marketplace because he felt that it wasn’t being played in the spirit he intended. It was an “addictive product,” rather than something to wind-down with at the end of the day - which, control freak-out aside, is really to ignore the contribution resistance makes to enjoyment and satisfaction.
If Flappy Bird had been slightly easier, no one would have even played it, let alone wound-down with it - well, no one over eight, anyway. The irritation and obsession expressed by the gaming public were part and parcel of a successful exchange between a designer and his players. Flappy Bird’s difficulty made it something we could really sink our teeth into - an aspect of gaming which has been overlooked in favour of content; difficulty being stigmatised as inhibiting play and exploration, and therefore the overall commercial viability of a game.
I can understand the anxiety, but it’s a simplistic way of thinking about it. The challenge a game presents can become as much a part of its DNA as its story and art direction; another tool that developers can use to make gameplay engaging and rewarding. While a difficulty slider makes sense for a lot of reasons, its drawback is that it prevents a game from having inherent challenge, voiding it as a defining characteristic. On the other hand, games which present a resolute and unavoidable challenge - all things being equal - inspire such dedication and excitement precisely because achievement isn’t a grey area. If Everest could be climbed on Medium, it just wouldn’t have the same meaning.
The original Nightmare difficulty.
Clearly, difficulty levels have been made more flexible over the years, not only for commercial reasons, but to suit the design of new gaming paradigms. However, when you consider that, on average, around 80-90% of players don’t finish games - including marquee titles - they don’t seem to have a positive effect on motivation. I wonder whether, in fact, they’ve had the opposite effect. That in a quest to provide access to their creative vistas, game designers have lost sight of them as signifiers of achievement; that by installing escalators on Everest, they’ve dulled the point of climbing it in the first place. I can Google the view from the summit. But I can’t download the experience of being there.
Daniel Clark is an Australian freelance gaming journalist and writer. Why not follow him on IGN and join the IGN Australia Facebook community? And if you liked Flappy Bird, why not check out the hundreds of games created as part of the Flappy Jam?
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