Flappy Bird Think Pieces

The Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery says that video game addicts are often obsessed with the game. They relive their previous plays and get overly excited thinking about the next time they will play. They can use the game to ignore other problems that are mounting.

They have a hard time cutting down or quitting the game. If they don’t play, they get agitated or annoyed. 

This may affect their relationships, jobs, and educational aspirations. They may lie to other people to continue playing the game. They could also be more tired during the day, struggle to complete assigned tasks, and see a decline in the quality of their work or schoolwork. Eventually they may cut themselves off from their friends and family to game more.

Wow. Talk about your psychological challenges. Put yourself in the position of any developer who actually responds to this ad. For starters, one of the only things that shields us from the madness of Flappy Bird is the fact that at any time we can tap out and go watch YouTube after a few minutes of bashing our avian heads against a celestial sewer pipe.

But to face the beast head-on for 20 minutes? It’s like the developer is taking team-building lessons from the Stanford Prison Experiment. What better way to roll out the welcome mat for potential employees than to subject them to torture from the outset? 

Much has also been written by game critcs about Flappy Bird’s popularity, enough for someone to aggregate thoughtful writing on the game as part of the Flappy Bird Think Pieces blog.

It is there where I found some thoughts that made me reevaluate about Flappy Bird. These pieces were enough to make me try the game again and discover a new respect for the casual “flapping-bird” genre of gaming.

Sometimes, games just seem unwinnable. Turns out, that helps explain why we keep playing them and try so hard to win.

“With these types of games — and with most addictive games — as we play them, we’re trying to fix something,” said Ian Bogost, a video game designer, critic and professor of interactive computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. “We’re saying to ourselves: ‘If I can just get this bird past these pipes, I’ll fix it. I’ll save that little bird, and everything will be O.K. in the world.’ ”

If only life were that simple.

Mr. Bogost said game-makers capitalize on our desire to “fix it” by offering us ways to buy ourselves out of seemingly intractable problems. In Candy Crush, for example, you can buy more lives; in Dots, you can buy more time.

Ng also owes the success of Flappy Bird and to its similarity with another mobile game called Angry Birds, another smash hit which received similar success. Difference is, Angry Birds, created by Finish game developer Rovio, has evolved into a household name globally. It appeared not to be fazed by the lime light, but instead thrived, expanding the franchise way out from its game roots.

If Nguyen was indeed truthful about his overnight popularity (not to mention, notoriety with some frustrated gamers) kicking him way out of his comfort some, does this mean business success is something one needs to prepare for?

Flow as a concept in psychology was coined by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s, when artists would describe in interviews the experience of getting lost in their work as like being carried along by water. Throughout the following decades, Csikszentmihalyi published a number of books on flow, starting with “Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play” in 1975 and later, throughout the ‘90s, numerous publications on flow as a means to a more effective education, achieving happiness, and unlocking the secrets of motivation and creativity.

What he discovered was that it wasn’t just artists, but athletes and chess players and students that relied on flow too. It’s now understood to be found within all sorts of other tasks, even everyday ones we barely think about as we do them, from mowing the lawn and shaving to cooking and ironing shirts. Basically anyone who is performing a task that met a certain distinct criteria could achieve a state of flow where your focus and sense of self reach a unique fluidity and, as Csikszentmihalyi put it in Wired magazine in 1996, “The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Csikszentmihalyi broke down the conditions for achieving such a state: There must be a clear and simple task; that task must provide instant feedback; there must be no distractions that either disrupt your concentration or make you ultra-aware of your own actions; and, key to the act of game playing especially, it must be a challenge with appropriate balance with regards to your own skill and the task’s difficulty.

Sometimes people want their games to be some combination of easy, quick and fun. Games such as Bejeweled, Candy Crush or Dots require very little time commitment. Even if people spend hours playing them, they provide more or less the same experience whether you play two games in a row or 200 — giving them the opportunity to pick up people who like to play games but don’t want to commit to a night on the couch.

Making short games is only half the battle. Part of Flappy Bird’s brilliance was that it was also such a challenge that it gave players a feeling of accomplishment whenever they managed to clear an in-game obstacle.

However, as inevitably as the world discarded the fads that came before it, the finite variability of a game where a bird flies through gaps of pipe will soon be forgotten — nostalgia of a time when a young man in Vietnam could get rich quick and become Internet famous. Had Nguyen wanted to see Flappy Bird die, all he had to do was wait.

Flappy Bird got so popular because of all the fury it generated from gamers (READ: Flappy Bird soars to the top by infuriating everyone). In fact, all this ire even spawned a vengeful spin-off (READ: It’s time to squish that Flappy Bird)! Seriously, though, nobody ever got through a long succession of pipes with a hot head. People who mastered the game had to learn to keep their cool, because in the end, you can’t win Flappy Bird if you smash your phone against a wall.

The same goes for romantic relationships. If you have a quick temper and allow it to get the better of you, you probably aren’t the world’s best girlfriend or boyfriend. Holding a grudge against your loved one, no matter how small, is going to ruin whatever great thing you share in the long run.