I was talking to Yannick LeJacq a week ago as he was writing an article on The Unflappable Brilliance of Flappy Bird, about the surprise mobile hit of early 2014.

To my surprise, Flappy Bird received an inordinate amount of hate (which I will get to below), so this was one of the very few articles to show any kind of interest in what made the game popular.

My thoughts on the game, some of which also made it into the article:

• Flappy Bird is so simple that it appears ironic. For a modern game, we expect upgrades, achievements, variation in the game, score increments larger than 1, forgiving collision. And none of those are present in the game.
• Perhaps this was intentional from the designer, perhaps not. Certainly, to play Flappy Bird is to engage in a bit of irony, marveling at all of the things that we expect, but which are missing.
• We tend to hope that we will find the perfect game; that there is some formula for creating the best, most addictive game possible. And whenever we have a new hit, those hopes get projected onto it. In recent times, the perfect game has been thought to be games like World of Warcraft, FarmVille, Candy Crush. And then another game comes along. Charles Pratt and Tadhg Kelly have made similar points. But I think it goes further: people play Flappy Bird because it flies in the face of what every game designer knows at this point. Not because players care the least about what game designers or theorists like myself think, but because the shared conventional wisdom of How You Shall Design Your Game is making games similar, and players know a breath of fresh air when they see it.
• The game is hard, but hard is casual: the fact that you fail every few seconds means that the time commitment dwindles down to seconds. (Super Hexagon being another recent example.)
• Like Qwop, Flappy Bird was a sleeper hit. Very challenging games have a particular snowball effect, where they undergo a phase change from being a challenging game, to being a game where we collectively can marvel at how challenging and unfair it is. (And hence not feel bad about failing.)
• Naturally, the simplicity is a feature. As I say in The Art of Failure, “This is what games do: they promise us that we can repair a personal inadequacy – an inadequacy that they create in us in the first place.” In Flappy Bird we very quickly learn how inadequate we are, but the game is so simple that we also immediately know how to escape that inadequacy (flap sooner or later).

The backlash and the removal

And then the developer removed the game on Sunday February 9th.

Leading up to his, the Vietnamese developer had received a considerable amount of hate, the high point possibly being the claim that Flappy Bird Is Making $50,000 A Day Off Ripped Art mostly because the pipes look like Mario pipes. This seemed to start a meme that somehow this game was in legal dire straits both for making green pipes and because other flap-the-wings-and-avoid-obstacles games already existed. Some sites gloated at the removal and suggested that it could have been caused by legal challenges. All of this is nonsense, of course. In my limited legal understanding, there is nothing copyrightable about green pipes, and nothing copyrightable about a core game mechanic. Flappy Bird is among the least guilty games in terms of cloning and borrowing graphics. Also remember that this was the game that no one expected to see.

Some other quotes:

• “as a game, the tap-to-fly-between-the-pipes gameplay is almost insultingly simple and uninteresting” (source).
• More thoughtful was Ian Bogost’s article. “Flappy Bird is a game that accepts that it is stupid to be a game.” (Source). Ian shares the feeling that there is something excessive about the game, and that this provides a certain enjoyment.
• But don’t get me started on comments.

The Backlash Backlash

All of this is very depressing. For reasons hard to fathom, a game by a small developer in Vietnam receives huge amounts of not-very-well-thought-through vitriol for making a game that confounds our expectations.

Get a grip everybody! The point is to be able to understand why people might be playing something that you are not naturally gravitating towards. If you want to be cognizant about games, your task is to understand why,  not just shout that “this game is stupid”.

And [all] journalists should try calling a legal expert before they point their fingers. And not to fan the flames. Sigh. Try to find that inner curiosity.

PS. Robert Yang has another critical look at the whole affair.

PPS. And just after I posted this, I see that Keith Stuart has posted an article featuring Bennett Foddy.

PPPS. And here is an interview with Dong Nguyen himself, where he says that he took the game down because it was too addictive – which differs from the motivations that everybody else ascribed the game’s removal to.

About that word, ludology: A few years ago, we tried to identify the historical first use of the word. My search lead me to identify Mihaly (Flow) Csikszentmihalyi’s 1982 article  “Does Being Human Matter – On Some Interpretive Problems of Comparative Ludology”.

Reading Csikszentmihalyi’s article, it always stood out that he does not seem to be introducing ludology, but writes as if this is a long-existing term that everybody knows.

In the meantime, the Oxford English Dictionary has added a ludology entry, which dates first use to 1961 in Mankind Quarterly. But was this really the first use? Again the actual text, “animal sociology, ludology and an essay on the psychology of labor and accumulation” makes it sounds like the reader is already supposed to know the word.

My further searches at first made it look like “ludology” had a special mid-20th century Indian connection, with many hits such as a 1941 article in the Calcutta Review mentioning a work “indispensable for every lover of ludology”. I was constructing a number of perfectly reasonable arguments for why this might be the case, but it turned out to be the OCR algorithm mistaking Ludology for Indology.

But I also did find an actual reference from 1951. This is Per Maigaard’s “About Ludology”, from the International Congress Of Sociology, 14th, Rome: 30th Aug.-3rd Sept. 1951. It’s not available online, but here are two excerpts.

The strange thing is how contemporary the thread of his argument is. It begins by stating the importance of games, and calling for a, yes, science of games, the establishment of ludology as a discipline. With some stylistic changes, you might have been able to sneak it into an early issue of Game Studies.

Page 1:

From page 3, including the word “ludologist” too, and a definition of ludology. And making a program for the discipline:

Maigaard’s take on that latter question is that it is too simple to say that games are distinct from work in that they are “performed out of mere desire”, because a) work is also sometimes connected with desire, and b) our desires do not appear in a vacuum, being contingent on circumstance and instincts. The closest Maigaard comes to a definition is this (he leaves it slightly open):

Now then, games are activities we perform thinking they are unnecessary and which are done from mere inclination.

This is a quite modern game definition of the subjectivist school, saying that it is not as much that games are any particular thing, but that they are the fact that we think of an activity in a particular way.

So the new date is 1951, and this article actually does define ludology. Still, I would have thought the author would account for his neologism, which he does not. So perhaps there is an even earlier source somewhere?

PS. An old article of Per Maigaard’s, discussing the historical origins of baseball was recently printed in the collection Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game.

PPS. The OED says that ludology may come from Italian ludologia ca. 1957, but I wonder if this is because Maigaard’s article was mentioned by Corrado Gini (of the Gini coefficient.) Finally, Gini notes the date as 1950, but other sources say 1951.