Sunday, February 9, 2014

From the Editor's Desk: The Flappy Bird paradox

Flappy Bird haters aren't wrong — but we're also in the minority.

Maybe I just don't get it. I'm all for mindless, time-wasting games. I think being able to shut down most of your brain for a few minutes and push some pixels around — then stop and pick right back up where you left off — is a good thing. I just didn't think Flappy Bird was a particularly good game. To each his own, I suppose. (I veg out with Jetpack Joyride and Plants vs. Zombies 2 all the time.)

And I wasn't alone. In every Flappy Bird story we ran, commenters were on my side. (At least that's how I saw it. This was personal.) Flappy Bird — insofar as mindless, free games go — was not good.

But here's the thing, and it's something we recognized fairly early (even if I took my sweet-ass time giving in to it): Flappy Bird was (and still is) a treasure trove of traffic. Make no mistake about it — folks were searching the web for ways to beat Flappy Bird. How to "win" at Flappy Bird. And, yes, how to cheat at Flappy Bird. It was downloaded tens of millions of times on iOS and Android. We'd be stupid to not write about it. (But that doesn't mean I had to like it.)

So it's not like nobody was playing Flappy Bird. Make no mistake, we haters are in the minority. We pass on bullshit stories all the time. Flappy Bird, for better or worse, became too big to ignore. But I won't be sorry to see it go.