As a pseudo-academic in games, I worry a lot about what will "make it" into "the history" of video games and what will be deemed culturally significant enough to study.
The latest spectacle with the game
"Flappy Bird" will either be (a) universally forgotten by next week, or (b) it will be the peculiar subject of some student's thesis paper, or (c) it will live as a game culture touchstone that gets invoked frequently for the next few years. Even though it's least likely, I'm writing this post for case B: it may be a somewhat obscure thing that gamers discuss once a year, or that games academia instructors will mention casually to their students, and maybe the students will dutifully google it and wonder what happened Back Then...
Now, because I can't tolerate the idea of
Kotaku's misleading titling or
Eurogamer's barely-researched and contentless coverage (
among many others) of Flappy Bird, marching unopposed into the chronicle of internet history -- I hope this blog post gets indexed and listed on the 3rd or 4th page of "flappy bird game history" search results or something. If you're writing a game studies paper on this, maybe put this paragraph under a patronizing header like, "Other Perspectives?", or at least give me a footnote and imply you read this. Thanks.
If you're reading this in 2015 and no one remembers what Flappy Bird was, then I want to emphasize one thing:
In February 2014, there was not much controversy for many game developers, especially indie game developers --
the internet was harassing Dong Nguyen for making a game, which is unacceptable. Many people do not support how Nguyen has been treated, and have said so. It is always important to remember resistance to a mob.