A game that rocketed to the top of app store and google play store in a few days left many people infuriated and entertained, often weirdly at the same time.
For those that aren’t aware, Flappy Bird is a mobile game where you control a bird that flies as you tap the phone screen. Don’t tap at all and the bird will fall to the floor in 0.25 seconds and it’s game over. The game is incredibly similar (one could say ripped off) of Super Mario Bros, and even features identical “green pipes” to the Mario Games.
Where have we seen these pipes before?
1. Simplicity of design – play by doing
The game features an easily recognisable 8-bit style that brings back memories of older games. When you load up the game, you are greeted with only one instruction “tap.” The game does not tell you to tap more than once, infact many people tapped once and found that their bird instantly hit the floor with a splat. From the very first few seconds of the game, you learn the consequence of doing things or not doing things.
Just tap.
Now, the gravity of the game is incredibly harsh. Your bird will hit the ground almost instantly if you don’t keep tapping. But you only learn this by dying multiple times. What this does is teach the player that to stay afloat they have to tap steadily. The game has only one button – yet achieves so much with it. More importantly, it lets you learn by PLAYING.
2. Humour and irony
Flappy Bird doesn’t really sound heroic or strong. And if you look at the physical appearance of our main character, he looks quite pathetic. Despite the fact that he/she is a bird, the wings are not emphasized at all in the art. Infact, it’s only the face, with the eyes and protruding lips that are emphasized, which tries to lead you to empathy. The only problem is with sound. The “flying” noise that the bird makes sounds like a feeble swipe in the wind.
The designer intentionally seems to be saying, “This is a bird that can’t fly.”
This is incredibly funny from a player perspective. When the bird hits the ground and dies, you hear a “punch to the face” sound that you often hear in cartoons. The bird doesn’t even really die, it just freezes there on the ground, looking bored. But these things aren’t done randomly, they’re done to enhance the irony of the game. It serves an important purpose for the actual design of the game. This is video game art at its best – looking good while actually providing gameplay hints/depth.
3. Bravery in game design/skill ceiling
Combine simplicity of design/controls with high skill ceilings. Skill ceilings simply refer to how much skill a player has to learn before they consider themselves a “master.” Although we love to feel powerful. it’s actually far more interesting for a game to be near impossible to master, because it gives us something to look forward to. What happens to people who have mastered a game? They lose interest. They’ve “beaten” it. There is no more gameplay left in it for them.
Flappy bird has a near vertical learning curve. The fast fall speeds coupled with the minimal height that the bird can actually jump means that getting past the pipes is a matter of learning precision, patience and rhythm. A lot of viral responses from Flappy Bird have comments such as “I hate Flappy Bird” and “This makes me want to kill myself.” What’s funny about those responses is they’re not literally true. We’re talking ironically. We hate dying over and over again, but yet we’re strangely drawn to the game by being stubborn and refusing to give up. This is extremely rare in games nowadays.
Under the guise of “accessibility” designers have been spoonfeeding their audience by either dumbing down games, excessive tutorials, drawn out beginning sequences and non existent difficulty curves/skill ceiling. Assassin’s Creed is one of the big offenders here, its “in depth” combat is nothing more than holding block and countering your attacker for an easy hit/kill. Final Fantasy 13 was another incredibly huge offender. You had to play about 10+ hours of the game in narrow corridors and “point A to point B” learning the combat system before the game finally puts you into a free exploration mode. What are designers so afraid of?
I love Flappy Bird because it is one of the few games where its difficulty is its selling point. It’s difficult but fair, which is always important. Some games have also been guilty of being overly difficult without any fair chances given to the player (think Ninja Gaiden series, which pulled some really nasty tricks on its players). It’s the perfect marriage of “easy to learn, hard to master” which I think is the golden ratio of game design.
4. Profitability.
There’s no escaping the fact that games are a commodity to be sold in bulk. It doesn’t matter if a game has brilliant game design, well written stories, excellent graphics and audio, if it isn’t financially viable, you can forget it. Flappy Bird was developed by a single person – this sounds almost as if we’re back in the 1980s! It’s in our interest as gamers and consumers that the games we love sell well, or at the very least, if they obtain “cult classic” status. If a game sells well, we’ll see more of it, which means more for us to play. There is an odd dichotomy in the industry today where you have the Hulking Titans of game design, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Rockstar, Naughty Dog, and so on – these huge studios with huge budgets and incredible staff power and resources to craft AAA titles. But this doesn’t reflect the core reality because on the other end you have the small indie developers with small budgets and big ideas. Some incredible indie games came out this generation. (Minecraft, Bastion, Gone Home to name a few). So you’re either playing something with huge production values (rare) or you’re trying out known or unknown indie games made by a few people; and that’s where the true bulk of game designers lie.
What this last decade has shown us is that gamers know the difference between value and price. Free to play games have exploded and micro transactions are becoming hard to ignore. Flappy Bird is part of that free to play legacy. Although now there are adverts when you play, it does not cover the screen or interrupt the gameplay in any way. Companies have to figure out how they can exploit a free to play system without sacrificing the game’s integrity. Ridiculous measures such as limiting inventory space, how much money you can spend, how often you can craft things are all cardinal sins in game design because it shifts the focus onto pay to win.
My curiosity goes out to the game’s maker, Dong Nguyen. With all of this money that he’s getting, where will he turn to next? He could just fade into obscurity having made that one important hit – or he could come up with a sequel and play it safe. Who knows.
Either way, a game’s likeliness to sell is going to affect its future and we are all deeply implied in this. You could even say money is the hidden subtext of gaming interaction.
5. Conclusion
Flappy Bird is a simply designed, well executed, satisfying piece of software that demonstrates how people becoming frustrated and learning from their mistakes isn’t a bad thing. It is full of charm and is hilarious to watch other people playing it. It may not be a God of War or a Bioshock or a Zelda, but these micro-games are going to form the edifice on which the heavier games will stand on – if they continue to exist.
The Ontology of Games 