A look at one current mobile gaming trend: games designed to frustrate you

Post-Flappy Bird, I can’t help but feel that many of today’s mobile game devs are simply trying to find a sweet spot between making players feel proud and pissed off.

Achievement means nothing if the task is simple. You have absolutely nothing to brag about if you drew a stickman, but you will be the awe of everyone around you if you somehow painted an amazing landscape using only your feet. And at the core of every game design, that’s what developers want us to feel: achievement.

You’d think games are all about either winning or losing, but you’d be wrong. Think of endless running games like Temple Run or Flappy Bird, where you are merely buying time before your impending demise. There is no winning in those games. But when you add a score counter, it becomes a competition against yourself and your peers, and although you will never get to see a ‘You win!’ screen in-game accompanied by a kiss from the princess you rescued, you get your winning fix by beating someone’s high score. An achievement.

(See: Escape 1000 km review: fun game with the worst timing ever)

But as I mentioned earlier, easy achievements are no achievements at all. You probably know first-hand how silly it feels to see a little popup window telling you you just earned a trophy or unlocked an achievement for simply booting a game up. Honestly I feel patronized and insulted when that happens. It’s almost as silly as celebrating birthdays. You went another year without dying! Here’s some cake. (I’m kidding, I love birthdays.)

And for this reason, mobile games seem to have, in recent times, kind of gravitated towards trying to be so hard that you actually earn bragging rights for getting even menial scores. And I blame all of this on Flappy Bird.

Dong Nguyen had no idea that his simple game about overweight birds would be a hit. And if you had showed the game to any gaming analyst, none of them would have put betting odds on it taking off, either. But he unwittingly provided game developers with a key to opening the Pandora’s box of gaming virality—making your game so mind-blowingly hard that “hardcore” gamers will brag about doing well on it.

(See: 10 reasons why the Vietnam-made game Flappy Bird is so ridiculously addictive)

See, if I had picked up Flappy Bird after having heard nothing prior about the game, I would have probably played through it ten times before uninstalling it. But my sister told me that she got a score of 20 on Flappy Bird. That, compounded with the fact that I pride myself on being a better gamer than her, made me play the game with reckless abandon till I hit a score of 21. And I promptly put the game down until she one-upped me again, in a loop of self-resentment and obnoxious sibling rivalry.

Get ready for a game over.

But as Flappy Bird died peacefully in its sleep after making Dong Nguyen a very rich man, other game developers put all they had into trying to recreate the proverbial Powerpuff-Girl-spawning Chemical X. Whether it was with shameless, blatant clones like Crash Bird or similarly infuriating games like Big Brother Flying Medjed And The King Of Fear’s Curse, it seems that developers are beginning to understand that there is a market for “hardcore” gamers on mobile devices.