![]() ![]() Today this is a prevalent design movement in the culture of independent video game development, designed without the financial support of a video game publisher. These machines had limited graphic and sound capabilities and it is these limitations in colour palette, resolution and memory that are applied by programmers to ‘modern retro’ games such as Flappy Bird. The player control in the game is particularly characteristic of masocore, testing the player’s reactions as they have to tap the screen at exactly the right time to continue, in a technique known as twitch gameplay, describing the successful players’ sudden finger movements.įlappy Bird’s graphics and gameplay place it in the realm of retrogaming culture – the subculture of playing video games designed by games console manufacturers from the mid 1970s-1990s including Atari, Sega and Nintendo, before the 5th generation of modern video game consoles took off with Sony’s first PlayStation in 1994. It follows Bushnell’s Law to such an extent that it could be considered part of the theoretical masocore genre, a portmanteau of masochist and hardcore used to describe games with extreme difficulty that rely on specific player techniques. Simple, but hugely difficult in practice. Its opening screen features one instruction – “TAP” – and from the moment you do, the game starts. Named after the creator of Pong and founder of Atari, the rule says that games should be “easy to learn and difficult to master”. Flappy Bird follows to an extreme the mantra known as Bushnell’s Law. The department decided on Flappy Bird when it came to the world’s attention having received over 50 million downloads, reflecting the medium’s success, its global reach (the game is from a Vietnamese studio) and as an artefact of digital design experienced by people in their everyday lives.įrom offensive tweets to violent videos on YouTube, Flappy Bird is famously frustrating – you may well have been one of the many millions of Flappy Bird players infuriated by its extreme difficulty! Nevertheless, it is this gameplay that made it a massive viral sensation. ![]() Looking at statistics such as these you can see how choosing the inaugural app to download to the museum’s permanent collection has been a challenge, and also how important it is that the museum represents examples of these ephemeral items. As of June 2014, there were 1,200,000 apps each on the Google Play store and Apple App Store, and 50 billion downloads have been made from Google Play and over 75 billion from the App Store. Why would a museum such as the V&A collect apps? Apps are clearly a significant part of contemporary culture. It sounds easy enough, but if you’ve ever tried playing it you’ll know this isn’t the case. A simple side-scrolling video game with 2D retro-style graphics, the player controls a bird attempting to fly through rows of green pipes, avoiding contact with them by tapping the phone’s touch screen. As part of the V&A’s new Rapid Response Collecting strategy, the Contemporary Architecture, Digital and Design team has collected the museum’s first app, Flappy Bird. ![]()
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