![]() ![]() He did not reply to a request for an interview and has stayed mostly quiet in the wake of the game’s recent and sudden success. “Flappy Bird” was created by Dong Nguyen, a Vietnamese developer with a studio called DotGears. A stain like our own miserable, tiny existences as players, which we nevertheless believe are more fundamental than the existence of bird flapping games or machine screws or the cold fog rising against the melting snow in the morning,” “A condition in the sense of a circumstance, but also in the sense of a blight, a sickness, a stain we cannot scrub out but may in time be willing to accept. ![]() “Flappy Bird is a condition of the universe,” says writer and game designer Ian Bogost in a 2,800-word article for The Atlantic. Over at Forbes, Paul Tassi wonders, “What does that say about society as a whole? Have we reached a level of boredom bordering on dangerous if we’re spending our time en masse on something so pointless?” “There is little else as substantive and convincing as ‘Flappy Bird’ that the smartphone era has driven us to the cliff of insanity when it comes to compulsive behavior, contracting attention spans, and a desire to succeed at something arbitrary and meaningless,” says CNET’s Nick Statt in an article titled “ Flappy Bird is the embodiment of our descent into madness.” Side effects of playing too much “Flappy Bird” include soreness of the tapping finger, anxiety, guilt, waves of anger and even existential crises. You are a smart, successful human with a college degree and a job, and you can’t stop steering a bird through a little virtual maze in the hopes of a double-digit score. It’s all tappity tap tap, death, anger and repeat until you notice an hour has passed, and you’ve only managed to get a high score of 3 points. Then, intoxicated by your hard-earned victory, you continue playing. Obviously you must keep playing until you get at least one point. “Flappy Bird” seems so easy, so completely inane that you are instantly angered by how difficult it is to keep the creature alive. Touch a pipe, however, and the little bird dies with a loud smack, nose-diving from the pale blue sky to the ground. Cruise through a narrow gap between pipes to get a single point. ![]() Tap the screen to make Flappy fly and navigate it safely through an obstacle course of metal pipes. You are steering a bird, a wide-eyed, 8-bit yellow bird with no tail and some serious navigational issues. Its addictiveness and absurd level of difficulty have driven many to the brink of madness and spawned a number of online rants and hysterical reviews. The game’s fluttering rise to the top has been a viral mystery. This time it’s “Flappy Bird,” a no-frills smartphone game that has become the most downloaded free iPhone and Android app in the past week. A tiny bird is frustrating game players in record numbers, again. ![]()
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