h a l f b a k e r yGetting blown into traffic is never fun.
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Flappy Bird is clearly racist, which is why it had to be taken down:
little yellow bird struggles precariously through the bamboo
forrest
getting smacked in the face over and over and getting
progressively
whiter and whiter medals as he does better and better, except
that
the woods are
infinite, and the whitest medal, a high score, is
covered in red. Well not necessarily racist but racially precarious
in
how it can be interpreted. Now I'm not saying that the creator did
that consciously, but that the essentializing nature of his game
design just let it shine through, which is probably why he had to
take
it down, to make a clear statement of his priorities.
So why not take the opportunity, in the absence of a real
beginning
so far to the conversation on race that Barrack Obama promised,
to
start an international conversation on race, just in time for the
2016
elections?
This could take the form of a series of a Flappy Bird knockoffs,
each
colored and themed for a list of racial, cultural, sexual and ability
environments.
You mean like this?
http://deidealewereld.vier.be/vladibird/
[ytk, Feb 15 2014]
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Annotation:
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He took it down because the enormous succes changed his life too much. He just went back to the way his life was, foregoing a lot of money but (re)gaining peace of mind. |
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<<enormous succes changed his life too much>> |
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Yes and I will also sell you everlasting life for only one
tenth of all of your earnings. |
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I find that piece of mind thing reeks of BS. Sell the game
and take royalties then. Disappear, like the CalvIn &
Hobbes author. Money is good and can do good. If you
have already done the work why forgo it? |
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//But to be honest, I'd never even heard of it until
I saw an ad saying it's being taken offline. My
earlier comment stands: someone please explain
how this game is functionally different from
Copter Classic, and why this incarnation seems so
popular.// |
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I think it's just that it was a joke amongst gamers
due to inherent difficulty or crapness etc. Then
some non-gamers mistook that for a
recommendation and bought. Once it was popular,
more people are interested, so it took off from
there. |
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This effect - that there is no such thing as bad
publicity was demonstrated elsewhere when the
hacking of random socialite's phone (Paris Hilton?)
was reported.
The message people got from that was not "this
phone is insecure" but "hey, look at all this stuff
the phone can do, as used by celebrities". So sales
of that model of phone greatly increased. |
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It's simpler than that. People like repetitive, mind numbing
entertainment with a clear objective. Hence the popularity
of Zynga games. What made Flappy Bird so popular is its
simplicity. You can start a game easily, and get good at it
fairly quickly, but no matter how good you get at it there
will always be a higher score you can get. And when you do
finally lose, it's easy to start over again. The whole thing
doesn't require much of an investment in time or
brainpower, so it's a perfect game to play while waiting for
a bus or in a boring lecture or whatever. That simple. |
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It's like Manga as opposed to American superhero cartoons -
- there's is a logarithmic difference. Flappy Bird may not
be racist, but I could read my own racism into it, because it
is interpretable, so it functions as cultural commentary.
Copter Classic is hard to read as anything but a helicopter
avoiding obstacles. |
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