![]() ![]() Sometimes the most satisfying things are the simplest. The lesson of Flappy Bird is that a game, or any product, really, does not need to be complex to command your attention and loyalty. This social dimension add what Eyal calls the "Rewards of the Tribe" to the motivational mix. ![]() Once you have exposed yourself to your friends (and likely gotten them hooked as well) you will feel pressure to improve your score-and compete with your newly infected friends. These social communications are actually a form of "investment" in the app. The helpfully pre-formatted tweet reads "OMG! I scored pts in #flapflap!!! ->" followed by a download link. When you (quickly) get to the "Game Over" screen, you can acknowledge defeat by tapping "OK" or you can tap to "Share" your score. The Social: Finally all of this frustration and hard-won success is exactly the kind of micro-content that people like to share via social media. (I imagine Flappy Bird 2 could introduce a variable by changing the amount of space between the pipes in unexpected ways over time.)Ĥ. (On a related note, have a look at this story on How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time.) The only variation as you endlessly scroll to the right is the height of the pipes. How do I balance the satisfaction of endurance with the tug of everything else in my life demanding my attention? This is not exactly sacred, but it is gameplay expressed as a dimension out of the normal flow of time. How long can I tap? How long can I maintain my focus. This is not infinite in the truly open-ended sense articulated by James Carse in his book Finite and Infinite Games, but rather durational, like performance art. The top players on the leaderboard boast perfect scores of 9,999, so we know that the game is not truly infinite, but considering how difficult it is to crack double-digits, it might as well be. The Infinite Game: Unlike complex, multi-level games, Flappy Bird extends itself merely through duration. You now have an itch that needs to be scratched.ģ. But once the internal reward cycle kicks in, once you are "hooked" in Eyal's parlance, this external trigger is replaced by a far more powerful internal trigger. You see the icon on your home screen and it reminds you to play. This is what Eyal refers to as an "internal trigger." The game itself, on your phone, is an external trigger. The achievement of sustained periods of focus become their own rewards. The primary payoff of Flappy Bird is what behavior designer Nir Eyal refers to as "Rewards of the Self" in his new book, Hooked. ![]() Anyone who has ever studied or taught meditation knows that concentration is a muscle that can be exercised and strengthened. So no matter how finely calibrated your tapping becomes, you need to maintain that focus for longer and longer durations in order to raise your score. Your score is based on how many openings you can successfully navigate in a row. The Flow: Once you master the action, the frustration has just begun. The basic game action is to tap the screen, not “too hard and too fast,” according to Dong, to keep the Flappy Bird at the right level so it can pass through the openings between the sets of green pipes that act as the game's only obstacles (see image above.) This is actually quite hard to do, and most players fail repeatedly before they even make it through the first "gate."Ģ. Indisputably, however, the combination of simplicity and difficulty is a key to its success. The Tap: Flappy Bird is an example of what is known as an "endless tapper." Tadhg Kelly discusses in a separate TechCrunch post why it is dangerous for developers and game companies to extrapolate a pattern from this successful instance and flood the app stores with more games from this genre. In the number one ranking is the winged flagship of his fleet, a maddeningly simple and challenging game called Flappy Bird (you can play it online here or download it from the App Store for iOS or Google Play for Android.) Currently in second position on the App Store rankings is Dong's soccer game, Super Ball Juggling and in sixth position, his martial arts-themed splatter fest, Shuriken Block.ġ. His Gears game studio consists, up until now, of just him, and yet it now has three games in the Apple App Store's top 10 rankings-a first for an indie developer. The latest is from an independent developer in Hanoi, Vietnam named Nguyen Ha Dong. Then, every once and a while, a surprise comes out of nowhere. Lately it has seemed that only large companies like Rovio, Zynga and King have the resources to promote games to the top of the app stores and create the deep, behavioral engineering required to keep them there. The casual games market is fickle and has a punishingly long tail for developers. ![]()
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