Flappy Bird, a game you can barely play for more than a few seconds without throwing your phone across the room in frustration, is dominating the App Store and Google Play. As for the Flappy Bird game, its deceptively simple appearance with graphics that harken back to the era of 8-bit gaming, is actually one of the hardest games you’ll ever play. And yet the gameplay involves nothing more than tapping your screen to keep a flying bird from running into green pipes that look like they've been snatched out of Super Mario Bros. Yes, that’s the extent of it. There’s no other challenge or story.
As you quickly die and die and die again, the urge to press “OK,” and “Start” seems impossible to resist, so you continue to re-spawn your stupid little bird and try to pass your best score.
Like most endless runners, Flappy Bird is a game with no conclusion that subsists solely on your hunger for a higher score and your dumb, completely illogical belief that you will in fact get any value out of playing, let alone feel like you're getting better at the task at all.
Game developer 29-year old Nguyen Ha Dong runs an indie game studio called .GEARS based in Vietnam. “.GEARS is not a company,” he notes. “It is just myself now but I have to use term ‘we’ to prepare for changes in the future.
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