Tap to Flap

     Firstly, I won’t be an interloper this time to give my personal opinions on the issue concerning the progress of the pork barrel scam case in the Senate nor provide some bias statements on the recent issue between the student and administration that the university is currently facing. Because in the very first place, I’m not entirely aware of the overall phase of each story and the truth behind every lie. So, let me just have this time to share my personal review on the newest addictive video game, the Flappy Bird.

     As of this writing, it has already been a month ago since the first time I heard about this tap-to-make-the-bird-flap game for Android phones. I’ve been seeing the posts of my friends sharing their experiences on this game on Facebook. Some were also boasting for their no more than 20 high scores.

With the curiosity in mind, I asked to borrow the Android phone of my classmate for a while to experience the thrill of playing this tapping game. At first and just seeing the start-up of the game, I was puzzled and asked my classmates “How come this game became popular?” I was able to raise that question because it can obviously be seen that the graphics of the game is low quality wherein the pouty-lipped bird that flaps and the background are both pixelated.

     As I played along, I became used to the simple mechanics in playing Flappy Bird. The player just needs to constantly tap the phones' screen to keep the bird flying and make it pass as many obstacles as possible without touching the green pipes. The game itself had proven to me that it is indeed amazing and addictive where it can hypnotize the player to proceed and play again once he failed in order to beat the phones’ somewhat low best score. After a series of rounds of playing, I didn’t wonder anymore why the video game became popular and caught most Android phone users’ attention.

     However, after a few days passed, I was greatly shocked when I read over the Internet the news about a 16-year-old boy who intentionally stabbed to death his 17-year-old brother just because his older brother repeatedly teased him on his 6-point high score on Flappy Bird. If you will be asked as to what do you think was the cause of this happening, would you answer that this is because of the addiction to the game? Well, if it is, we should not be surprised to the number of incidents similar to that of the two brothers.

     In this case, we cannot put the blame on the Flappy Bird game. We cannot conclude that Flappy Bird is a bad influence. It will just be up to the user how he is going to adopt the addiction to the game properly. I believe that the Flappy Bird was develop for entertainment and not to ruin one’s leisure.

     Before I will end this article, let me inform everyone that the Flappy Bird game was taken off from Apple’s App Store and Google Play by the maker of the game, Dong Nguyen not because of the authenticity and legal issues that is thrown to the game, but it is through the will of Nguyen to end the addiction.

***This article was published from The NORSUnian, the official weekly student publication of Negros Oriental State University.***

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