That’s just not an arbitrary comparison with (arguably) the most famous video game of all time, though. Flappy Bird and Mario share the same DNA. Visually, Nguyen appropriated the iconic warp pipe as the principal obstacle for flappy bird to navigate. Mechanically, each game is centered around precisely timped jumps.
But they diverge. The Mario games offer discrete challenges, each one situated in its own landscape. There is stable ground beneath your feet, something to retreat to and rest on between moments of challenge. In Mario, the player is expected to learn and grow as the game goes on, mastering each challenge just to be faced with another step. Finally the game offers completion, a state of total mastery over the elements, symbolized in this case by the rudely patriarchal acquisition of a woman of status.
The struggle of Flappy Bird is infinite. You are born, given a brief period of free practice, and then immediately set to jumping through hoops. The object that could transport you across worlds has become the principle object. The challenges are not designed: they are mindless, randomly set. You can never see further ahead than the next hoop. There are no enemies: death comes as a result of any interaction with the landscape, no matter how slight. There is nothing to rest upon: you must continue your struggling flaps until you are brought to death by your own clumsiness. The world of Flappy Bird is indifferent to your accomplishments.
I’ve never been much of a platform-game player, though. I always get frustrated with the challenges and quit. But Flappy Bird brings me into an almost meditative state of calm. When I’m doing well, it’s a quiet state of flow. My highest scores have come from when I started playing with some anxious train of thought running in my mind that distracted me from the game, and I don’t notice the choices I’m making as I play. I am as disengaged from Flappy Bird as Flappy Bird is from his surroundings.
Where Mario is a game of touching the world and mastering it, Flappy Bird invites disengagement from the world around you in favor of a soothing state of flow. You pass between obstacles almost without noticing them, until eventually one finds you: game over. But it’s easy to restart, and it’s not like you lost any accomplishment.
