Looks easy, but is it? (Flap Flap..)
Unless you have been living in the Flintstones-age, you definitely must have stumbled upon ‘Flappy Birds’, which was a global phenomenon couple years ago. Yes, I chose to write about the late Flappy Bird game, and not the hot Pokemon Go (well, to be honest, even Go has seen its days now).
I attended the TUX Talk last week by Lennart Nacke on the topic: The Science Behind Gamification and Games User Research. Dr. Nacke talked about how the retention and user motivation into playing games have led to this new stream of Gamification, wherein we are trying to transform the day-to-day non-game tasks into set of goal specific game-based tasks. The idea isn’t new after all; from employee of the month, to getting that A+ grade in a Mathematics course, or be it selling the magazine to 40 customers. However, gamification has become increasingly popular as a topic of research only in the recent past. And, [un]expected success of games like Angry Birds, Temple Run, Subway Surfer, Candy Crush (Ah, those annoying invites on Facebook), has been a solid boost for the advancement in this stream.
Apparently, the developer of the game, Dong Nguyen, took down the game because it had become too addictive. Was Flappy Bird the top-notch software marvel in the gaming field? Surely not. The graphics reminded many of us about the early childhood days of playing Mario on the Nintendo consoles. So what was it that made the game so lovable after-all?
It was easy to learn, but hard to master.
Flappy Birds provides a deceitful assumption of simplicity; few blocks of graphics, and a single tap as a controller. Yet, this basic user interface in-turn is cognitively complex. As mentioned by Charles Mauro, a visual inspection of a UX solution is far from the truth compared to its actual cognitive complexity.
Mr. Nguyen created the game, with next to zero error tolerance. You tap the screen few milliseconds early, and you start from scratch again. At no point can you recover from a previous position; no bonuses, no lives. The game is absolutely brutal, still millions of people play it for uncountable hours. As Dr. Nacke pointed out in the lecture, and putting that into the context of Flappy Bird, I feel that it was (is) a huge hit, as it rewarded the player with a high sense of achievement and contentment. Moreover, UX was designed in a way, that you can restart your journey instantaneously. You die, you play again, and well die again. This behavior resembles to the slot machines in casinos as discerned by a group of researches in Las Vegas. Slot machines requires an easy skill-set and provide a highly repetitive interaction model with virtually no error tolerance. You either gain, or lose. Never come back after swinging the slot.
We talk about material design by Google, or even the more widely ‘minimalist designing’ term used these days. I feel Flappy Birds is a classic example which should fall into this category. It shows how a highly simple looking piece of software can hold deep complexity beneath it.
