Addiction Haunts Game Developers, Too

When games get too “catchy,” artistic concerns become ethical ones. Image: Desiree Catani/Flickr

It’s a strange sign of the times when two of the most prestigious business publications in the world are racing neck-and-neck to be the first one to break news concerning a smartphone game about a tiny, semi-flightless pixelated bird. And yet there we were on Tuesday, with Forbes and the Wall Street Journal both claiming they finally cracked the code of why Dong Nguyen decided to jettison his hit game Flappy Bird at the height of its success.

There’s a long, tangled story about how Flappy Bird got to this point, which involves rampant speculation about how much money the game makes, whether or not its art was “ripped” from Super Mario, and even rumors that Nguyen pulled the game because he was intimidated by legal threats from Nintendo (not true, according to them). Amidst all this, Nguyen seemed to be doing his best to escape the spotlight he had suddenly found himself in—writing on Twitter over the weekend that he “cannot take this anymore” and imploring people to stop asking about the game’s commercial state.

This would have been the weird, sad ending to the story of 2014’s biggest and shortest-lived game. But people wanted more. You could tell from Twitter alone, where his message was retweeted almost 145,000 times and his followers skyrocketed to well over 150,000. When I first looked him up on Twitter two weeks ago, he only had a few thousand followers. Last Saturday, the day he first revealed he was ending Flappy Bird as we know it, that number was up to 26,000. Even to people who enjoyed Flappy Bird, Nguyen’s sudden celebrity was shocking. That he would step away from such an enviable position was even more perplexing.

Finally, he gave his reason: he thought the game was “too addictive.”

“Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed,” Nguyen told Forbes. “But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever.”

I want to be careful not to read too much into Nguyen’s statements here, since journalists trying to expound upon his brief semi-public appearances likely played a big part in Flappy Bird’s precipitous rise and fall in the first place. But if his statements can be taken at their word, I find his reasoning intriguing—particularly given how it flies in the face of most of the expectations I’ve come to have about the people who make decidedly “casual” games like this.

$50,000 a day—the amount Nguyen was estimated to make from Flappy Bird—is a lot of money for a single person, sure. But it’s nothing compared to the $654,000 that the Finnish studio Supercell reportedly makes off its strategy game Clash of Clans. Or the $1 million Candy Crush Saga is estimated to pull in every day for its creator King.com. I never hear developers of those kinds of games fretting over whether or not their games are “too addictive.” In fact, last year when I attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, I discovered there was an entire series of panels and speeches dedicated to sharing ideas about how mobile game makers could figure out even more ways to convince their players to pay.

All of this helped me start to see an uncomfortable tension that exists in video games today. “Addiction” might not be a physiological phenomenon in video games the same way it is for coffee, cigarettes, or heroin. But the word, perhaps for want of a better descriptor, has a special meaning for many game developers. While talented and charismatic entrepreneurs like King’s Tommy Palm don’t exactly go around encouraging people to mainline Candy Crush, they speak openly and enthusiastically about the most artless sounding parts of their games—user acquisition, retention, and spending—all with the focus of how to increase those values.

And that’s fine. But there’s another camp of people who think that people like Tommy Palm are out to destroy video games as an art form. We’re finally able to create majestic, cinematic works like Journey and The Last of Us, the reasoning goes, but now smartphone games are trying to plunge games as we know them back into the muck and mire of slot machines.

Suddenly, artistic concerns become ethical ones. The outspoken indie developer Jonathan Blow has often epitomized this viewpoint, comparing the makers of World of Warcraft to drug dealers and calling the social gaming company Zynga “evil” for the ways they lure players in with feedback loops promising meaningless rewards. Blow is far from the only one to espouse this view. Just today, I got a taste of this hostility when I reached out to a game developer who works at one of the industry’s largest companies to ask what he thought about the Flappy Bird kerfuffle.

“Who cares?” he responded. “That’s like asking me what I think about sports broadcasting; it has nothing to do with me. Or my art.”

Part of what he was trying to distance himself from here was the lionization of “addictiveness” as a value in and of itself. That may not be unique to video games, but it’s enough of a problem that it regularly disturbs game makers and critics alike. In his 2011 book How To Do Things With Video Games, the game scholar and designer Ian Bogost highlighted the issue:

Game designers talk openly about how to make their games “more addicting,” but “catchy” is certainly a better verbal frame than is “addicting.” Indeed, why would anyone choose to call their craft “addicting,” a descriptor we normally reserve for unpopular corporeal sins like nicotine. Why would we want a game design to sound like drug dealing, the first “easy to use” hit opening a guileful Pandora’s box of “hard mastery?”

Bogost was trying to advocate the adoption of a new term, “catchy,” which points to a key problem: while addiction is a fraught concept in game design, it’s too often used (both as an insult and a compliment) in a completely unscientific, ambiguous way. That might sound like a semantic concern. It wasn’t, it seems, for Nguyen.

But even after all of the events surrounding him as of late, he still maintained that he’s not done with making games. Far from it, in fact: he told the Journal that he’s currently working on three new prototypes “in a similar vein to Flappy Bird.”

When I read that this morning, I was reminded of something the game scholar Jesper Juul had told me that I’d left out of my first story on the game, back in the innocent age of a week or so ago when it was still on the app store.

“At a very high level, it shows you something about human culture,” Juul said at the time. “Even after all these years, we’re still hoping we could crack the nut to find the ‘perfect formula’ for a video game.”

He was referencing the surprise and occasional disgust that players were voicing about why this, of all video games, would be such a runaway success. I checked in with him again to ask if he felt Flappy Bird had revealed any divide between proponents of “casual” and “serious” games. Or “addictive” and, er, “non-habit forming” ones?  

His response was telling.

“I think it’s more the idea that some kinds of addictiveness are symptoms of good design, but others are results of evil psychological manipulation,” Juul said. “But no one can explain what the difference is.”