A little pixel bird has taken over my office this week, and I am not proud of how much time I've lost to it. It's called Flappy Bird, it's free, and if you haven't seen someone hunched over their phone muttering at it yet, give it a few days. You will.
The premise is almost insultingly simple. You tap the screen to keep a tiny bird flying, and it has to squeeze through gaps in a series of green pipes that look like they were traced directly off the original Super Mario Bros. cartridge. No scaling difficulty, no tutorial, no mercy. One touch too many or too few and the bird just drops out of the sky and you're back at zero. My personal best, as of this morning on the train, is twelve. Twelve pipes. I watched a coworker named Dave get to forty-seven yesterday afternoon and then nearly put his phone through the break room wall when he clipped the forty-eighth. Nobody got any work done between about 2 and 3pm.
What gets me is how cheap the whole thing looks and how expensive it feels to play. The graphics are ugly on purpose, or at least I assume on purpose, all flat greens and a bird sprite that flaps like it's having a seizure. There's no music beyond a couple of blips. And yet it's apparently one of the most downloaded free games on the App Store right now, which either says something about how bored everyone is in January or says something about how good genuinely mean game design still works on us thirty years after the NES came out. I lean toward the second one. This is a game that wants you to fail, over and over, and somehow that's the hook. I have complicated feelings about a single developer (I've read it's one guy, working alone, which is a little bit incredible) putting out something this deliberately punishing and having it catch on this hard. Mostly I'm annoyed at myself for caring about the number 12.
Anyway. Completely unrelated except in the sense that it also ate an hour of my week: yesterday I got the email from Yahoo saying they'd noticed a bunch of coordinated attempts to break into Yahoo Mail accounts and that I should go change my password, just in case. I still have a Yahoo address from roughly 2003 that I mostly use for old mailing lists and the odd account I forgot I signed up for, so my first instinct was to shrug it off. Then I actually thought about how many sites are tied to that inbox for password resets and decided shrugging was a bad plan. So I spent part of my lunch break updating that password and, while I was in there, two other accounts that were using some version of the same password, which I know I'm not supposed to do and do anyway like everyone else. If you've got an old Yahoo account gathering dust somewhere, it might be worth a look. Takes five minutes and it's a lot less annoying than dealing with the aftermath if it turns out that account is more load-bearing than you remember.
I keep meaning to actually set up a proper password manager instead of my current system, which is a mental algorithm involving a base word and some numbers that I will not be describing here. Every time there's a breach story I tell myself this is the week I finally do it, and then I don't, and then six months later there's another breach story. At some point the embarrassment of that cycle has to outweigh the ten minutes of setup, right? Ask me again in June.
Between the password shuffling and losing to a two-inch cartoon bird approximately forty times, it hasn't been the most productive week I've had. But I did notice something: the bird game doesn't ask for anything. No account, no social login, no permissions screen full of things it definitely doesn't need. You open it, you fail immediately, you try again. There's something almost restful about a piece of software that isn't trying to harvest your contacts list while it ruins your morning commute. Small mercies.
If anyone beats forty-seven, don't tell Dave. He's still recovering.