free as a bird: flappy bird as mindfulness
on nostalgia, ethics in tech, and one very heavy bird
Is there any better social unifier than being hopelessly addicted to the same phone game? Rarely did I start a morning during the initial wave of Wordle hype without first staring at the blank wasteland of my daily grid, always with rabid focus and usually on the toilet. There is a pious minimalism to the practice of Wordle-ing: You get six shots to nail down the five-letter word du jour—no more, no less—so the pressure to choose wisely adds a certain drama that, from the outside looking in, could seem a bit outsized. The once-a-day scarcity is a large part of what made the game so addictive to my (and maybe your) modern, give-me-everything-immediately-right-now-please-I’m-begging-you mentality.
Our newfound Wordle world, however, has made me more than a little nostalgic for the mindless, less self-serious apps of our past. I never played Candy Crush, but I’ve peeked over the shoulders of people playing it on the train enough times that I feel like I have. Lord Candy Crush, as we know, is in the business of keeping you glued to the game as long as possible so they can wring you dry for in-app micropurchases that let you, so to speak, keep up your Tootsie Roll. These apps offer a counter-thesis to Wordle’s “once a day” ethos: Park your ass down and feed your addiction until the sun’s up and your eyes are crossed.
In the pantheon of limitless gameplay, one beloved hero rises above the rest: Flappy Bird. Flappy Bird was a simple, sweet game for iOS and Android that asked nothing of you except to keep one illogically heavy bird from falling to a pixelated death. You guide him past Nintendo-reminiscent green pipes one tap at a time for as long as you can. That’s it. There’s no known end to the game, no levels, and no bonuses or rewards system besides a shiny medal on your home screen that changes colors as you rack up points (one per pipe passed). There are no multiplayer options, special abilities, or level-ups to be earned. You can’t customize your character or background, and you most certainly can’t turn off its infuriating sound effects. All you have to (and can) do is keep that little guy flying.
It’s a perfect game.
Through some miracle of Android data importing, I still have Flappy Bird on my phone (and on a Google tablet I got on sale in 2016 whose battery runs so hot I sometimes have to cover my hands with my sleeves to hold it—chic!). I downloaded the app in the fall of 2013 and, like most of its fans, was held in its grip for almost a year. It was addictive in the best way—a competition purely between you and your best score (and sometimes your best friends, for bragging rights). A typical Flappy Bird newcomer would glance at someone’s phone and scoff at how simple the game looks, then spend the next half hour beating their head against the screen, trying to understand the baffling physics behind getting this “stupid fucking bird” past more than 3-5 pipes (I’ll say it again—the bird is dense!).
We tapped along in flappy bliss, comparing scores and ruining our posture, until the game’s creator, Dong Nguyen, permanently removed it from the App Store and Google Play on February 10, 2014. He gave the following statement the next day to Forbes:
“Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed,” says Dong Nguyen, in an exclusive interview, his first since he pulled the plug on the app. “But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it's best to take down Flappy Bird. It's gone forever.”
Or, to quote a Tweet he posted six days before taking the game down:
“I can call 'Flappy Bird' is a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.”
Taking down your wildly successful, monetized app because you felt morally icky about it? Standing ovation. All of Silicon Valley could stand to take a page out of Nguyen’s book. He saw the game’s addictive quality as an ethical failure, not a selling point. He passed up opportunities to sell the app to a buyer or to develop a rumored sequel, ignoring the internet’s pleas. To play Flappy Bird in 2022, you either have to use its less-satisfying fan-made browser version or buy an ancient iPhone with the app still on it off eBay for $600+ (much more reasonable than the 2014 market, when one sold for $9000).
Flappy Bird was suddenly a limited commodity, so if you didn’t already have it, too bad. Nguyen’s announcement was met with worldwide mourning, and the culture, in turn, dropped the memory of Flappy Bird like an old toy in favor of brighter, louder, and more dynamic gameplay. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone even mention it in years, online or otherwise.
Eight years removed from the hype, my relationship with this rotund 8-bit bird has evolved from a social activity to a personal exercise in mindfulness. Players used to brag about their honed techniques for how to keep a streak going, but I have always been a firm believer that the best way to succeed at Flappy Bird is to not think at all. I let my eyes go unfocused and stare at a fixed spot in the middle of the screen—not fixated on the flaps behind me, not fretting the flaps to come. Just: Green blur, tap. Next green blur, next tap. I turn off my volume and tune into the buzz of my washing machine or my next-door neighbors’ bickering to try to slip into a reverie.
This stupid fucking bird and I have fallen into a precious symbiosis. I rely on him to lower my heart rate, and I find inspiration in his optimistic pursuit of a nonexistent goal. In return, my thumbs work hard to ensure he doesn’t sink like a stone and bury his beak in the pixelated earth, his unblinking cycloptic eye staring in horror in the direction of hell. We need each other.
Mindfulness was always a key strand in Flappy Bird’s DNA—the simpler, the better. Nguyen spoke about how developing the game was in part a reaction to buzzier apps like Angry Birds that he believed demanded too much from their users:
“I don’t like the graphics,” he says. “It looked too crowded.” Nguyen wanted to make games for people like himself: busy, harried, always on the move. “I pictured how people play,” he says, as he taps his iPhone and reaches his other hand in the air. “One hand holding the train strap.” He’d make a game for them.
While it’s been a minute since I’ve held a train strap in the midst of pandemania, the beauty of the game’s construction still hits: It doesn’t need you to use your whole brain, it doesn’t need its color scheme to yell at you, and it doesn’t need to consume your day. It makes me look back on my fellow morning commuters that clutched Candy Crush between both hands with a certain type of sadness—at the end of the day, was all that maximalism even fun?
It’s rare today to find a calm, soothing app that isn’t peddled by commodifiers of “calm” and “soothing” (see: Headspace, Cerebral, and the wellness industry at large). To download an app advertised as good for my brain feels like joyless homework. Why should I sit cross-legged in my office chair while a man with an Australian accent whispers to me through my headphones to “go to my happy place” when I could instead just try to beat my high score on the Bird Game? Headspace et al want to encourage well-being so we can convert it into productivity, not peace. This has bred an entire generation of finance bros who do breathing exercises outside conference room doors so they can close a deal with a quiet mind, likely while drinking Soylent. That’s not a bandwagon I’m eager to jump on.
Flappy Bird, on the other hand, doesn’t give a shit. He just wants to fly, and he needs my help to do it. That’s part of the beauty of this simple, infuriating little game—it gives you room to project whatever you want onto it lone protagonist. I see hope in his flailing winglets and sorrow in his plummets; his victories and losses are mine, too. Who am I not to heed the call?