The simple genius of Flappy Bird

http://www.mrspeaker.net/2014/02/26/genius-of-flappy-bird/

by gren • 12 years ago

41 31 12 years ago

Part of me is convinced that the genius of this game is that it can be completely operated with only one thumb, even while riding a crowded subway.

bromagosa2• 12 years ago

Yes, but there have been thousands of clones of SFCave and only this one has been that successful.

I think I recall the original one featured an helicopter and ran on an Amiga, or something of the sort.

Actually, the first thing I did when getting my first Android phone about 4 years ago was downloading a version of SFCave for Android, and it's been on all of my subsequent phones ever since.

wmil• 12 years ago

I think it's most important feature is fast restarts. Too many game devs think a 30 second loading screen is no big deal.

userpasswd2• 12 years ago

It would be down in the dumps without a great luck anyway. Thousands of so-challenging games prove the point.

maresca• 12 years ago

His rise in the app store is questionable. He most likely gamed the app store using bots.

userpasswd2• 12 years ago

That would I call genius, however questionable it is. For me it feels 90% of people have no other reason to play a challening game than to brag to the other from the 90%. You just need to get into the spotlight.

DanBC• 12 years ago

His rise in the app store happened after he was featured on a popular Youtuber's account.

A couple of million people seeing someone play your game will tend to drive sales in a way that pushes your app up the charts.

a3voices• 12 years ago

It's a copy of the game Helicopter from Ebaumsworld. You don't need to be a genius to copy a game.

tfgg• 12 years ago

The irony of saying someone copied anything from Ebaumsworld.

davebees• 12 years ago

The mechanic is different.

teamnyble• 12 years ago

The /entire article/ is listing arguments why the author believes "it's just a copy, lol" doesn't ring true. Which ones are you disagreeing with?

watwut• 12 years ago

Helicopter from Ebaumsworld "copied" it too. There are approximately millions copies of 2D-something-flies-and-avoids-obstacles games. First one was created approximately 20 years ago or sooner.

Almost all of them are boring and few of them are able to keep players interested for more then 10 seconds.

Transforming simple idea almost everybody else had into something that keeps players engaged counts as achievement too.

Given madness it caused in minds of some people, I'm fine with calling it simple evil genius.

bromagosa2• 12 years ago

Which was itself a copy of an older game called SFCave, which was a copy of some much older game I can't remember...

I once wrote a similar game featuring a penguin swimming through an underwater cave (http://reggaeperxics.com/cave.html), and I recall I managed to discover the story of the original game, but for the life of me I can't seem to find it anywhere on the Internet now!

zeidrich2• 12 years ago

The interesting thing about flappy bird is not the gameplay.

The interesting this is how it was a sleeper hit. Sitting hitting in the app store in May until it completely exploded in February.

The interesting thing is how people shared and cared about the score, and had the ability to that on a larger scale. Even if you did care about your score in the helicopter game, you couldn't easily tweet about it, and as the popularity of the helicopter game rises, it's not going to be picked up by news outlets.

The thing about anything that goes "viral" is that they don't need to be very good. And I think it's folly to look too deeply at their mechanics. It's a simple little game, and it's a game that's not at all the first of its kind. It just happened to somehow get the attention of someone who could bring it to the attention of a bunch of people, and they brought it to the attention of many more, and all of a sudden it became cool, for a little while. But with the reach of the media, when something is cool, it doesn't mean your whole class is playing it any more. It means millions of people around the world are. That said, you have to compete with a lot more to get that focus.

Had the author not pulled the game, in a few weeks it would have died off anyways. But the game has got a lot of popularity from people who simply want to duplicate its success. People care less about playing the game now, (it's not a great game, it's interesting for a few weeks) and what they are really interested in is how to make 50k per day by building a shitty game.

Double_Cast• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Apophenia /æpɵˈfiːniə/ is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

The term is attributed to Klaus Conrad[1] by Peter Brugger,[2] who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness", but it has come to represent the human tendency to seek patterns in random information in general, such as with gambling and paranormal phenomena.[3]

mrspeaker3• 12 years ago

Aw, c'mon... I'm saying (with probably too many words for the internet, I'll concede) that changing any (not all, any of the details of Flappy Bird makes it shit. I tried it.

That's not seeing random patterns - that's double-blind testing. Well. Kinda.

Luc2• 12 years ago

Perhaps you are really bad at game design? (It's okay, so am I.). You made a clone, you haven't understood the mechanics, and you call the original genius because your random changes don't improve it?

miggyb• 12 years ago

It's a good argument, but I'm still not entirely convinced. Using "actual" gravity instead of video game gravity and having questionable collision detection sounds to me like it could have been done on purpose or it could be the result of poor planning or programming.

Maybe the "random" distance between starting the game and the first pipe coming up is also just a function of how far along a loop you are when you start playing. Did you check the timing or when you started compared to the background, for example? If it's completely random, that's actually very interesting. At the same time, however, it doesn't seem like there's any purpose for that, either.

I'm guessing that this is the only game Dong has released and there's no way for us to look at his previous work to help confirm/deny his genius status. It also doesn't look like he's going to keep releasing games. I think I read somewhere that he's not really open to interviews either. Oh well. It's looking like it might be one of those internet mysteries that will remain unresolved forever.

vinceguidry• 12 years ago

People tend to make that argument a lot when someone analyzes design, and it betrays an ignorance of the craft.

When you design something complex, your eyes and mind have to examine and make decisions on every detail. Even if the decisions took much less time than someone's later analysis, it's still a decision and there was still a significant amount of conscious or unconscious thought surrounding it.

Notice I said 'unconscious' thought? In this case, analysis is even more important, to help drive out a discussion on elements that nobody's really had yet. You might balk at calling someone whose obviously just 'threw something together' a genius, but the hand and eye and mind that threw something together like that managed to do something that thousands of others try and fail.

mrspeaker3• 12 years ago

Wow, I remember this guy from the Flappy Bird Typing Tutor (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7210459) that was all the rage last week. He must be one smart and handsome cookie!

interstitial2• 12 years ago

Probably smart enough to have gotten his bitcoin out of Mt. Gox ages ago.

zeidrich2• 12 years ago

I've seen him. He's rubbish.

Luc2• 12 years ago

There's also this hilarious article, which I assume is written by a masterful troll: http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/Full+Indie+UK+news/featu...

I can only shake my head at how misguided these people are. If Flappy Bird is genius, there's tens of thousands of genius games on the App store alone.

superasn• 12 years ago

As someone mentioned earlier on HN, the real genius of flappy bird is the signle/double digit scores that people tend to gloat about, when they beat yours. It's hard to care about a score like 434,456 but 93.. that doesn't sound so scary.. at least when your last hi-score was 83.

gabemart• 12 years ago

I've only played the Android version, but I never found the collision detection anything less than pixel-perfect. If I'd felt the collision detection was poor, I'm fairly sure I wouldn't have enjoyed playing it as much as I did.

The author seems to imply that the collision detection is poor, then backtrack and say that actually, only collision detection that cheats in favor of the player is good. In this kind of simple 2D game, I think that cheating collision detection would lead to frustration.

Criticism of Flappy Bird seems to divided into two camps:

The first dismisses it as a clone of any one of a dozen or so older helicopter-style games.

The second descends into ridiculous over-analyses of the ephemeral merits of the game.

I find both camps irritating.

It may be a clone, but it's a clone that's done extremely well. Execution is everything. None of the "Flappy Bird done in X" versions that made the rounds came close to me.

And it may be a well designed and executed game, but luck is clearly the largest single factor that propelled it to worldwide success. A well-designed, well-executed, easy-to-learn, hard-to-master fun game with viral potential is the prerequisite for mass-market growth, but it's not even close to a guarantee.

interstitial2• 12 years ago

If only someone could write the definitive Bitcoin / WhatsApp / Flappy Bird Trifecta article that fully encapsulates the the get rich unit tests embedded in the HN carbon-based CPUs, we could have more stories about Node.js and Angular.js on the front page.

drcode• 12 years ago

Are you saying React.js isn't the way to go?

josephlord• 12 years ago

The speed at which you can go from death to flying again is also really important to keep you hooked.

jamesjamesjames• 12 years ago

This article was a nice advert for the poster's game... that's about it.

The simple genius of Flappy Bird

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