Your heart is pounding, your hands are sweating, and you’re dodging pipe after pipe as you flap through an obstacle course mere centimeters from inevitable game over, and then it happens… you flap too late and before it even hits you that you were only one pipe away from that elusive high score, the words “Game Over” mock you from the screen of your phone. You look at the clock and can hardly believe what time it is. “Have I really been playing Flappy Bird for three hours?” you say to yourself. The answer, of course, you already know, “Yes you have slowly been consuming your life with the hopeless efforts of the little bird trying to flap his way through a nightmare of green pipes that will never end.”
This flappy fantasy has been sweeping everyone with a smart phone. The intense challenge presented by the game Flappy Bird, has proved itself to drive many casual players to the edge of insanity and back again, all with the promise of having the highest score. When I first heard of the game Flappy Bird my friends were playing it and complaining of course about the difficulty of the little arcade app. Of course wanting to try the game for myself, I downloaded it off the app store that night. After thirty minutes of smashing the poor bird’s face off of the first and second pipes over and over again, I finally gave up and removed the app permanently from my phone.
“This is ridiculous!” I thought to myself. “Why would anyone want to spend hours playing a game on their phone that was so difficult?” However I felt about the game, it didn’t matter; within the next couple days, Flappy Bird seemed to get bigger than ever. Everyone was playing it; it was all over twitter, all over Facebook, Reddit, iFunny, Instagram, any kind of social media imaginable had become a place for Flappy Bird to be broadcasted publicly with people’s high scores and the time they lost trying to get there.
So, of course despite my best judgment, my finger hovered over the download button yet again… was it worth it? Would I ever be able to get more than the measly two points I had before? Looking back now I realize the mistake I made. Maybe I did get past those two points, but what have I lost? The hours spent flapping through pipe after pipe, the frustration of seeing game over, the hopelessness of never reaching a high score, just for the chance of the slight momentary satisfaction of flapping through that one pipe more than I ever had before.
The worst part of having the app now is that the creator of that app removed it from the app store so it can never be downloaded again. He couldn’t handle the pressure of knowing what his creation had done to the world. Knowing now that if the app is deleted it can never be reinstalled, it is impossible to remove it from your phone. The fear of finally getting Flappy Bird out of your life only to suffer because of never having the chance to get it back is worse than the actual pain of the game itself. What can be done about this tragic blight that has taken the smart phone community in its tiny flappy clutches? Will we forever be trapped in the world of pipes and wings living with the daily fear of being stuck without hope of a high score?