from Hacker News

The simple genius of Flappy Bird

by gren on 2/26/14, 1:40 PM with 31 comments

• by superasn on 2/26/14, 2:40 PM

  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.

• by Double_Cast on 2/26/14, 2:32 PM

  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]

• by piratebroadcast on 2/26/14, 2:03 PM

  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.

• by mrspeaker on 2/26/14, 2:34 PM

  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!

• by interstitial on 2/26/14, 3:27 PM

  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.

• by gabemart on 2/26/14, 3:00 PM

  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.

• by Luc on 2/26/14, 2:40 PM

  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.

• by userpasswd on 2/26/14, 2:05 PM

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

• by josephlord on 2/26/14, 4:22 PM

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

• by jamesjamesjames on 2/27/14, 1:12 AM

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

• by a3voices on 2/26/14, 2:08 PM

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