Flappy Bird: a metaphor of life

Not sure if it’s still around, but there was this mobile game called Flappy Bird. It was very popular in 2015 I believe. The game is very simple. There’s a 16-bit graphic bird and the player taps the phone’s screen to create an upward momentum to keep the bird floating in the air. Without the taps, the bird falls to the ground and dies. And in order to keep playing the game, the player has to control the bird precisely to go through obstcales made of green pipes (one pipe sticks from the top of the screen, the other from the bottom and there’s a gap between the pipes, through which the bird is supposed to pass). There’s a series of pipes and the height of each gap differs, to the point that sometimes the bird has to freefall right after passing one gap in order to reach the next gap’s opening. A skillful tap needs to be applied, otherwise the bird hits the rim of the pipes, falls and dies.

It’s such a simple yet addicting game that embodies the mantra that defines great games (Easy to learn, hard to master). Also there’s this thrill where I let the bird free-fall to the point that it almost hits the ground but I boost it up again to the air and it narrowly misses death.

There are a couple of things that I remember that made me think about things beyond the game itself.

• Entropy: When the game starts, the bird will start free-falling unless the player taps the screen to prop it up. Isn’t this like how we’re born and sustain life? Eventually the bird will fall to the power of gravity, since even though the game doesn’t have an end but the player has to go to bed at some point. The player has to keep feeding the upward momentum to fight the entropy that keeps flowing toward one inevitable direction. It’s like us nourishing our body with food as the fuel to move our body, also eat well and stay fit to live longer. But we all know we’ll all die eventually. Nonetheless, we’re still fighting the entropy to savor the time we’re here in this life. Staying alive is a lot of work.
• Obstacles to go through: The bird can just keep on flying without the obstacles, but would that be a fun game? Obstacles makes a story, tensions and sense of achievement and thrill. The challenges in our lives are similar to this. Of course we can move to a place where we can live by ourselves and lead a self-sufficient life by growing our own food and we don’t really have to interact with anyone else and avoid all the crap that comes with having to live with other people and having to fulfill responsibilities required from the society. But most of us still stay in civilization, interact with others and fulfill responsibilities given to them. Challenges and duties provide a sense of purpose in life and fulfillment, leading to finding the meaning of one’s own life.
• Flappy bird’s unfazed faces when it dies: This was so remarkable when I first saw it. When the bird eventually falls and dies, the face doesn’t change from how it looked when it was alive and flying. Think of how other characters die. Mario from Super Mario Brothers (which this game is definitely influenced by, given the green pipe’s design) makes a perplexed and grimacing face, blurts out “Mamma mia!”, falls off the screen and dies. Of course it’s possible that the game designer wanted to update the sprite for the bird’s death but ran out of time (or punted it to V2). Nonetheless, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I love the bird’s maintaining the same face throughout the whole game, which is so zen. It reminded me of this poem Self-Pity by D.H. Lawrence. Birds will drop frozen dead from a bow but will not feel sorry for themselves. Entropy finally prevails in one way or another but they still keep their dignity, unfazed till the end.

Am I saying that people who are so emotive and expressive like Mario aren’t cool and the stoic ones are the only cool ones and we all should be like them? Is emotion bad? Should we all stop jamming to pumping or moody songs on Spotify and only listen to the guided meditations on Headspace? Of course not. I still think though it’s worth trying to make the sine wave of emotional ups and downs narrower, and not to dwell on the height or the bottom of it too much, realizing that it’s just a moment in time, nothing more than that, and it will eventually pass.

Even for the dead flappy bird, there’s a new opportunity as long as the player’s willing to try again. Just hit the Play Again button and the bird is back, flapping and trying again.

After a few cycles of thought, the dead flappy bird’s unfazed face feels more about the metaphor of how we handle failure (just face it, be unfazed and relentless, try again) than the actual death.

Also feels like I should submit this topic of unfazed face of the dead flappy bird to a subreddit for unintentionally profound things (Just looked up but there’s none 🤷🏻‍♂️).