You might have good grades, but what is your score on Flappy Bird?

Countless times have I been up until the wee hours of the morning, toiling through the plethora of assignments my academic schedule issues, when it dawns upon me that now would be the optimal time to download that new game all my classmates and friends have been buzzing about. “This’ll be a great,” I think to myself. “It’ll help me unwind a bit.” But it doesn’t. It’s freaking “Flappy Bird,” and within the first two minutes of playing it eight times, I hear “whoosh,” “ka-splat” and “phew” eight too many times. I can’t get the stupid eight-bit yellow bird past the first freaking green pipe. After 15 minutes and reaching a prestigious high score of two, I exasperatedly deleted the app off of my phone, fully convinced that that “Flappy Bird” was created by Satan to prove to God that a large group of humans can have their priorities compromised by a cell phone game.But is it? As much as I find it comforting to attach satanic imagery to “Flappy Bird” and dismiss or ridicule it as unworthy of our time, I cannot deny the overwhelming number of people I saw playing it while it was available on the app market. Several sites and blogs were created either offering cheats and tips on how to win the game, or trying to gather signatures for a petition to banish “Flappy Bird” from the app market (at least some people got what they wished for). Perhaps even more alarming, after the app was pulled off the App Store, iPhones with “Flappy Bird” still installed on them were being sold for exorbitant amounts of money on retail sites like eBay. The even scarier thing is people actually bid on them — the highest bids reaching around $10,000 — until eBay promptly shut the transactions down, as they were a violation of Apple’s policies.It’s easy to see how and why the terrifying frenzy drove the creator of the app, Dong Nguyen to remove “Flappy Bird” from the App Store and Google Play Store. He tweeted: “I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users...I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.” Nguyen later elaborated that it was not due to “anything related to legal issues” and he “just [could] not keep it anymore.” If Nguyen wasn’t running from the notion that he would be facing a copyright lawsuit under the charges of having stolen the idea and graphics of a Nintendo game (the green pipes “Flappy Bird” flies through look notoriously similar to the warp pipes in Nintendo’s long running series of video games based off of an Italian mustached plumber, Mario), and he certainly wasn’t running from the reported $50,000 he was making off of ad revenue. What was it, then, that he “[could] not take any more?” The onslaught of death threats and pressure and weight of having summoned the contemporary, tech version of Cthulhu certainly makes for a more likely contender. Which brings me to the bigger question: How did we let ourselves become so consumed with an 8-bit game in which, not only winning is impossible, but the sole incentive of the game is to maneuver a bird through a neverending series of green pipes, that we began making death threats to its creator, that we spend every waking minute trying to beat our high score, that we shamelessly pushed aside our school work to play it, that some of us are willing to spend unwarranted amounts of money on it? Is it possible that humanity’s next biggest obstacle won’t be ending world hunger, but dealing with an unhealthy obsession with distractions?Parents have been dogmatically associating video games with the notion of derailing of their children’s minds and leading them down a path of addiction, depression and delinquency since the invention of first person shooter games.I feel like our (sometimes) distraught, misled parents, claiming that video games are making our brains go bad. However, in an experiment  conducted by Daphne Bavelier, a neuroscientist of the University of Rochester and the University of Geneva, a group of non-gamers played “Tetris” while another played a first person shooter game, “Medal of Honor.” Before and after the experiment — which required ten days of playing the games for an hour — the groups took three visual attention tests: the Medal of Honor players scored better on all three tests when compared with their initial scores while the Tetris players showed no improvement.So yes, I concede that a good number of video games are not at all bad, aside from their ability to bewitch our priorities. But as “Flappy Bird” isn’t a first person shooter or action game and thus technically doesn’t offer any of those cognitive benefits. Which is not to say that pointless cellphone games are worthless. According to the American Psychological Association, “simple games that are easy to access and can be played quickly, such as ‘Angry Birds’ can improve players’ moods, promote relaxation and ward off anxiety.” All I can say is that for you addicts out there, you’re definitely better at handling failure in the form of “ka-splat,” “whoosh” and “Game Over” than I am.The internal effects of “Flappy Bird” might not be clearly defined, but they certainly show what I think is a deeper message about us. We are obsessed with wasting time, with being distracted, with stupidity. Any excuse to get away from our gross, repetitive idle lives, especially when it so freely offers a neverending supply of obstacles and is easy to commit to, is attractive. Couple that with the self-esteem boost having a score over 100 provides and it makes for a lethal addiction which when allowed to metastasize spreads into our bank accounts (a la Candy Crush). “You might have good grades, but what is your score on “Flappy Bird”?” “If you text/call me when I’m playing ‘Flappy Bird’ and I die, then so do you.”Albert Einstein once defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Every time you play “Flappy Bird” you are engaging in a diluted form of insanity. We stubbornly ignore our inner conscience that tells us to stop. We chase after the idea that this next round of “Flappy Bird” will yield that glorious three-digit score. The boundless amount of perseverance we have when it comes to small things is a very intrinsically human thing to do. Heck, Rick Astley wrote an entire song about never giving up.[“Flappy Bird”,] we’ve known each other for so longMy heart’s been aching but you’re too shy to say it[In between the pipes], we both know what’s going downWe know the game and we’re gonna play it.CHORUS:[Never gonna win]Never gonna winNever gonna winNever gonna winNever gonna winNever gonna winNever gonna win