![]() ![]() In my opinion this is a very small, humble piece of genius. This forces you to make a series of difficult split-second decisions about whether and when to flap while you’re inside the barriers. “It also adds depth to that simple foundation using one extremely elegant and subtle innovation: the width of the barriers is just slightly wider than the half-width of your flap/jump. “What makes Flappy Bird work particularly well is that it eliminates all extraneous complexity to focus on one very simple input mechanic,” says game designer Bennett Foddy, who specialises in extremely unforgiving physics-based titles like Qwop and Girp. And Flappy Bird is great game design, when viewed at this molecular level. A great game system turns a mirror on the player’s inefficiencies and errors. Once again, this is crucial – this is the kernel of compulsive game design, from Space Invaders to Call of Duty. The alchemy of these different parts has created a machine that players feel they ought to be able to operate, and when they fail, they blame themselves. But it is clear that Nguyen has spent time working out the exact vertical lift achieved by this single input just as he has got the gap between pipes exactly right. Similarly, Flappy Bird is based around a simple interaction: press screen to flap wings. It needed to be perfect, it needed to be an exact science, and it was. After this, he continually iterated and tested the extract angle and height of the jump to ensure it was just right – that it was just easy enough to use, but still reliant on skill and timing. However, adding a jump button made players feel more in control, while only very slightly increasing the complexity of the interface. Originally, the controllable character in Miyamoto’s classic arcade game Donkey Kong couldn’t leap over incoming barrels, which made the controls easy, but rendered the experience impossibly difficult. What he learned was that players must very quickly understand the limits of their presence in the game world that if the controls are simple and fair, interactions with complex systems start to become compulsive. “So I would try to analyse how the game made players feel that way.” “I concluded that was born of the players being mad at themselves,” he once explained. He had an industrial design background and didn’t understand the appeal. Early in his design career, Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto obsessively studied popular arcade titles like Pac-Man, trying to work out what made them so popular. One good way to ensure compulsion is to make the operator believe that they can always do better, and if they don’t, that failure makes them angry enough at themselves to trap them in the loop. Video games are about precarious balance – they are machines of compulsion, and they require an operator who is engaged enough to keep cranking the handle but not too comfortable that they get bored and want to stop. There is a long history behind this title’s cheerful sadism. But to me, a child of the 1980s who spent every seaside holiday pumping 10p pieces into brain-squelchingly tough arcade titles like Defender and Gunsmoke, Flappy Bird is just a continuation of a particularly unforgiving approach to game design. Last week, The Guardian’s own Stuart Heritage amusingly wrote about how he wanted to smash Flappy Bird into a pulp. ![]() This infuriating ambiguity seems to have come as a shock to many observers. The reaction from gamers has been one of utter frustration mixed with the hopeless need to continue. Many players take several minutes just to pass through the first pipe gate, and hours of concerted effort are required to get a score over ten. The interface is simple – just keep tapping the screen to flap the wings – but the game is extraordinarily difficult. In case you have somehow missed out on the short flight of this fascinating game, Flappy Bird is a free-to-play smartphone title in which the challenge is to guide a cute bird character through a tunnel of pipes, varying its altitude so that it can slip through the gaps. Flappy Bird was despised, at least in part, because of misunderstandings about how the games industry and game creators work. Others have lambasted Nguyen for whining about earning a reported $50,000 a day from the game. “I cannot take this anymore.” Some have seen in this a sort of victory for honest game design. “I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down,” he tweeted. The minimalist pipe-avoidance sim that scorched to the top of the iPhone free game rankings earlier this year has been removed by its creator, Dong Nguyen. ![]()
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