No, Christ, don’t look to me for an impassioned editorial about Flappy Bird. There’s already an Encyclopaedia Brittania’s worth of bullshit about this now-withdrawn mobile game and its overly-scrutinised creator out there already, as SEO-crazed news sites strain to capitalise on interest in a from-nowhere breakout hit. The trafficks! The precious trafficks! The absolute worst of these are those who retch up hasty, broad essays about how this is a lesson that we all need to be more excellent to each other, a hollow masquerade as empathy to justify and conceal a feverish attempt to wring one more drop from this story’s bone-dry washcloth.

I have seen only one truly convincing show of support for Flappy Bird itself, and it is telling that it is achieved almost wordlessly. Terry Cavanagh’s ‘fan game’ Maverick Bird uses his familiar abstract-minimalist style (as most famously seen in Super Hexagon), but without uttering even a single syllable demonstrates admiration and affection for what its inspiration actually did. … [visit site to read more]