The Crisis of 2014: Flappy Bird

When 29-year old Vietnamese game developer, Dong Nguyen released his game "Flappy Bird", he had no idea the immense impact he'd made on smartphone users everywhere. Although it was released in May of 2013, the game reached it's peak popularity in the past few months. The game, known for its notoriously hard levels, has over 50 million downloads.

Even though the game looks like a rip-off of classic Nintendo games, the surge of popularity was just too much for Nguyen to handle. He announced on Twitter, February 8: “I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.”

While I never played the game, I watched many of my friends fall addicts to what seems like an honestly stupid game.  from what i could tell, you just try to get a bird through a series of pipes.  But in the past month, my social media became flooded with friends' high scores and challenges to beat others' high scores.  I have even seen monetary bets being placed on the game.

Maybe Nguyen was right to remove the game.  If such a simple game can become an addiction so quickly, what does that really say about our attention spans?  People on Ebay are trying to sell iPhones with the game installed for upwards of $2,000.  Let's be real, that's just ridiculous, not to mention against Ebay's rules, so please don't fall for it.

Here's my advice to all the "Flappy Bird addicts": Delete the game from your phone and go hang out with your friends.  Seriously, there's more to life than the game.