I have a new addiction and I’m not too flappy about it.
Recently, I’ve been staying up until midnight, not because of homework, but because I’ve been playing the insanely addictive new cell-phone app Flappy Bird, a game that half the school seems to be addicted to.
The objective is pretty simple; tap on the screen to flap your wings and fly but avoid pipe obstacles.
Although its instructions are straightforward, playing the game is not. The game is insanely hard to master. The first time I tried playing it, I got past the first pipe … and that was it. My grand total score? One.
I figured I got such a low score because I wasn’t really paying attention to the game. Then I played again and again, but the result was the same: a score of one.
After those first few attempts, I was frustrated to the point where I slammed my phone on the ground and declared this game was stupid. I mean, how hard could it be navigate a flapping bird through some spaces between stupid pipes? Wanting to prove to myself that I wasn’t an idiot, I unknowingly spent the next two hours locked in my room playing Flappy Bird.
Finally, after I had emerged from my room, I had what I thought at the time was a decent high score of 24. I was content with myself and didn’t touch the game for the rest of the day.
The next day, I was ready to give up Flappy Bird. It had already lost its new game appeal and I was about to delete the app. But then I saw my friend, sophomore Arjun Ramanathan, play. His high-score: 42. Even though his high-score wasn’t that much higher, I absolutely hate losing and I couldn’t stand having a worse score than Arjun. Immediately, I started playing again.
This time, it was different. I wasn’t playing because the game was fun, I was playing because I had a mission. A mission to have a higher score than Arjun, a mission to defeat evil and see good triumph, a mission to flap my wings like no other bird before me.
This was the point when I truly became addicted to Flappy Bird. When I woke up in the morning, I started playing until I absolutely had to leave for school. During lunch, I ate as fast as I could in an effort to start playing Flappy Bird. After school, I played the game for hours before starting my homework.
After two days, I was ready to boast to Arjun about my new high-score of 97. I casually walked up to him and asked, “Hey bud, how’s Flappy Bird going? What’s your high score now?”
He merely shrugged his soldiers and said 121 as if it wasn’t a big deal. I think I cried a little on the inside when he said that.
Even though I’m not even sure I enjoy playing Flappy Bird, I still can’t stop. Whether it’s because I want to have a higher high-score than Arjun or because I just like procrastinating, I have a problem.