Flappy Words: A debate on the gravity-challenged bird.
Not so many years ago, smart phones didn't exist, it rained less and JAVA and Flash game portals were the enemy of many a school IT department. We all had our favourites, most of which involved tossing penguins, collecting gems, or surviving as long as you could. Not much has changed.
A favourite of mine was the helicopter game; a mechanically simple and personal goal setting treat where you guided a helicopter through a cave. When you weren't holding the mouse button to increase the altitude of the helicopter, the helicopter was falling. It made its way on to smart phones in the early days, when smart-phone gaming was just ports of classic web games. There was a nice sense of flow to the controls and the procedurally generated (although we used to just say ârandomâ back then) caves got harder the further you went.
Flappy Bird is the helicopter game with an alternative contextual reference (it's a bird instead of a helicopter). However, it's not just a re-skin, purposefully obtuse take on the helicopter game.
The thing is, I suffer from a condition called 'designer disease'. it stops me from just playing a game. A good barometer as to whether Iâm enjoying a game is the time it takes for me to start analysing it. The better the game, the longer I can just simply play it before engaging âdesign modeâ.
Mechanically, Flappy Bird is the dilution of game design (in a good way); player input and response, and the challenge presented by the game world. The first two stops on the game design express (and the only stops on the Flappy Bird route) Â are âhow is the player interacting with the worldâ, and âwhy are they doing itâ.
So what do you do in Flappy Bird?
You tap, and flappy bird goes up. Simple.
Immediately after my first tap I was concerned at the amount flappy bird increased her height. Itâs a delayed input-response, that for a fraction of a second makes you think the touch was missed, and then WOOSH, she goes. If we were to visualise the movement curve from start to end, the start would be a small boat a mile from land, where suddenly you are greeted by the white cliffs of dover.
I didn't get the timing right, or so I thought. Next try, same result. And again, and again, and again.
I began to think I was doing something wrong, but the only thing I could do was tap. How could you get that wrong?!
I wasnât, itâs just very very difficult. Why? Hereâs the (fake) science bit.
The amount at which flappy bird increases her altitude is roughly about 65% of the gap in which you have to guide her through. Flappy Birdâs sprite height is roughly 22% of the total vertical space in the pipe. Unless youâre in the lower 20% of the gap between the pipes, youâve got no chance of correcting any wrong position.
Simply put, you can make no mistakes. None. Itâs crushingly difficult.
You need to plan how to get through the next gap even before youâve gotten through the current gap. In order to do this you might need to re-adjust where you are currently, otherwise youâll never make the next one...but ARGH, you canât, because youâll hit the pipe. You panic, you tap, you die.
If there was a more forgiving difficulty curve to allow you to get in to the flow of your run, then the above percentages would be fine as you progress further. The fact that they are the only percentages you have to play with makes it very very difficult to get any real sense of flow to your run. I feel the flow is important. It can ease players in to a game. It can make them feel like they are getting the hang of something at a steady pace. Itâs the initial driving lessons in a car park before getting out on to the road.
If Flappy Bird was teaching you to drive, sheâd put you in an F1 car going the wrong way down the M25 and ask you to do a full-loop of the largest car park in the UK without stopping and hitting any cars.
Flappy Bird is intended to be hard, I get that, and itâs part of the âcharmâ. My main gripe is with the way in which itâs achieved creating the difficulty is by taking the core mechanics and reducing them to their least functional forms. My designer disease doesnât allow me to see beyond this; I wish I could.
Flappy Bird was never intended to be big, it was never intended to be good. It was just intended to be what it is. The important thing is, that people are enjoying it. Iâm not, but thatâs because I canât get passed the fact I believe it could have been so much better and still maintaining the difficulty.
I remember the first time I opened up Flappy Bird. I briefly glanced at the half-hearted attempt at making a knock-off Cheep-Cheep, and pressed the start button.
My little knock-off Cheep-Cheep hurtled to the floor, like the Earthâs gravity had multiplied by ten.
I laughed uproariously, made an actual attempt to read the instructions (which consisted of the word âtapâ and an arrow pointing up), and tried again.
I made it to the first pipe, went hurtling headfirst into it, and howled with laughter again.
âOk, Iâm guessing I know what this game is.â
No gimmicks, no in-app purchases, no BS. Flappy Bird is a one trick pony, and itâs an annoying, frustrating, gloriously addictive one trick pony. And every time someone announces their frustration with the game on twitter, I canât help but love it that little bit more - even more so when itâs Russ.
It is not the free-to-play equivalent of Dark Souls or whatever moniker people are latching to it; what Flappy Bird does, is tap into what makes free-to-play games work: by being (would you believe it) free to play. Itâs the kind of game you could throw on an arcade cabinet with the simple instruction of âtap button to make bird flapâ â akin to Pongâs, âavoid missing ball for high score.â
It has no more mechanical function than Canabalt. Ok, thatâs a lie: you can push down on the screen to make the guy jump a little bit higher. But itâs touchscreen gaming at its most beautiful and teeth-crushingly difficult; you tap, you flap.
It does seem that our feathered friend has a slight delay whenever it/he/she is commanded to flap. But there's an element of ingenious design associated with that: if you've ever played the original Castlevania, the game has a delayed input on Simon Belmont's whip, therefore every action you make has to be thoroughly thought about before hand. You can't just go rushing into a room and expect to wipe out every enemy on screen in a mind-numbing haze of button-bashing carnage.Â
The same rule applies here, with every action needing to be thought out before hand; from what angle to enter between the two pipes, to keeping yourself level between the two pipes, and finally making a clean exit that straightens you out to enter the next set. And the obvious challenge is doing that over and over and over and over...
Flappy Bird has been described as âpure evilâ - which it is not, not when in the very same week that it exploded onto iPhones and Android devices over the world, EA released the reboot of Dungeon Keeper. A game universally despised for its blatant abuse of its in-app purchase system.
Is Flappy Bird tough? Sure, it offers an almost unfair challenge, but the failure still comes at the hands of the player, not the creator. The game was designed this way in mind â for better or for worse. Just in the same way that all those crushingly difficult 8-bit games were created to be challenging (ok, some were barely created at all), Flappy Bird exists with a similar ethos in mind.
And going back to people relating it to Dark Souls. Yes, that game is utterly relentless in its ability to punish you. But with an official guide at hand, the challenge is â somewhat â reduced. The only way to reduce the difficulty of Flappy Bird is to get better at it â you got stuck on Quick Manâs stage in Mega Man 2? No guide is going to help; you just have to get better at it. If Flappy Bird werenât created the way it was, I would argue that it would have never gone as viral as it did, unless the rumours that its developer used bots to artificially shoot the game up the top of the charts were true.
But I digress. The sheer challenge is the entire gimmick of the game, to remove or reduce that difficulty is to remove the whole point of the game. And personally, I donât think the game is all that difficult. Not that I have any claims to being good at it.
But it does raise this question: if the game had been released on PC, with its market being largely focused on hardcore gamers, would it have had the same reception? I get the feeling that its label of being crushingly difficult is solely based on the audience the game is marketed at. And I donât doubt that at some point in the future, someone will come up with tests to further analyze this theory.
 It wonât be me though, as Iâm still trying to top my score of 23.Â
