The Flappy Bird Leaderboard: A Roster of the World’s Biggest Scoundrels?

There are lots of things to be angry about. Barely a day passes when I don’t open a newspaper and heave a heavy curse about humanity’s propensity towards wickedness. The world is filled with high profile people it’s easy to despise and some of them rightfully deserve the title ‘World’s Biggest Scoundrel’: Vladimir Putin, Nick Griffin, George Osborne, Bieber. Yes, you heard me right. I said ‘Bieber’…

Yet I don’t want to talk in terms of people who display unique qualities of malignancy. I’m trying to highlight that infernal leaning within human nature itself. I’m talking about people possessed by the need to spoil and destroy. I don’t even mean the poor wretches who, for example, robbed the Pharaohs’ tombs, destroying priceless works of antiquity in the process. They were at least looking for gold to help feed their families. The Nazis destroyed irreplaceable works of art but even that was driven by an ideology, abhorrent though it was. That’s not to say they didn’t do evil but their evil was precipitated by a reason. Even flooding, fracking, and Channel 5 have their reasons.

All acts of human wickedness seem to have their origins in some dark twisted motive. All, that is, with the exception of one…

Nothing explains the actions of those festering blisters of scrotal tissue that so smugly sit towards the upper tiers of the Flappy Bird leaderboard. They are the pimpled scourge who have destroyed the game for no obvious reason. Flappy Bird might be the world’s most annoyingly addictive game offering a trivial distraction involving tapping a screen to steer a small bird through gaps in a scrolling series of green pipes. But let’s not understate the crime. Unlike Dungeon Keeper, Flappy Bird is a free game that doesn’t try to steal the inheritance off every child by addicting their parents to minion slapping and gem mining. It’s just offers them a fiendishly difficult challenge before they gloat about their scores among friends and the world at large.

My highest score on Flappy Bird is 43. Bloody heady stuff, I know, though my average score is in the more humble lower fours. When I scorched my way into the record books with 43 (I look at that number now and still can’t believe how hot my form was that day), I was so proud of my achievement that I immediately accessed the game’s leaderboard, expecting to see my name glowing in the global top 10.

Sadly, I wasn’t even in the top 100. I wasn’t even in the top ten thousand.

The game currently has four million players and the top score is currently held by somebody called Jack. Jack’s score is: 9,243,372,036,854,776,000. Impressive, I think you’ll agree. By my back-of-the-knuckle reckoning, Jack steered his flappy bird through 9,243,372,036,854,733 more green tubes than I fluked, by which I mean, of course, ‘skilfully negotiated’.

Now, I grant you that some of these numbers are a bit too heavy to throw around so early in the week. To save you the trouble of wrapping your brain around the score that wasn’t a remarkable 43, let’s reduce it to something a little more manageable. If the Green Tubes of Doom were passing Jack’s flappy bird at a more-than-generous rate of one every second, then 9,243,372,036,854,776,000 seconds is equal to 153,722,867,280,912 minutes. That’s 2,562,047,788,015 hours or 106,751,991,167 days or approximately 292,471,208 years. In other words, Jack has been playing Flappy Bird for 292 million years or nearly 100 million years before the landmass known as Pangaea began to divide into the continents we know today. If that’s still too big a concept to comprehend, it was 50 million years before the Ice Age or fifteen minutes before the Tories made their last sensible policy announcement about global warming. Given that Flappy Bird first appeared on the Apple store in May 2013, I don’t think I need to check with lawyers before I suggest that Jack might just have been cheating.

Jack’s not the only villain out there flapping his bird in our general direction. The 100th placed person has a score of 2,147,483,647, which equates to a more reasonable 68 years but still means they had to start playing in the spring of 1946, which is pretty unlikely, however addictive Flappy Bird happens to be. Upwards of two thousand million seems to be the score you’ll need to get in order to be in the global top 1% of Flappy Bird players (approximately the top 40,000), which means that either 1946 was a very good year for Flappy Bird or websites detailing the methods of cheating have been doing good business in the past few weeks.

Now, I accept I’m not going to ever hit that target without cheating and I’m not complaining simply because my honest 43 hasn’t been properly recognised with an MBE in the post. It worries me that Flappy Bird’s creator, Nguyen Ha Dong, has now taken the game down. Before the data is lost forever, we should at least find a good use for the global Flappy Bird leaderboard.

Never before has humanity had a resource this powerful: a database of the biggest louses, weasels, and scabietic vermin on the planet. I’d be surprised if the NSA haven’t already saved it to a pen drive. This is a handy pocket sized list of everybody with that flawed gene that drives them to cheat. Employers should have access to the leaderboard when they’re about to fill a post demanding trust, unless, of course, they’re bankers or MPs, in which case they’ll probably use the leaderboard as their talent pool. You want to know where future scandals are going to begin? Just look at the Flappy Bird leaderboard to find the future despots and villains, the corrupt officials, the arch criminals, the people who will usher in the world’s doom accompanied by an avatar of themselves looking suitably smug. If the Pyramids, the Moon Landing, or the last PJ Harvey album are examples of the astonishingly great and beautiful things that humanity can accomplish, then the Flappy Bird leaderboard shows us at our worst.

Our Grand Theft Culture

I’ve played all the Grand Theft Auto games (yes, even the original) and I often thought the media reaction to them was largely misguided. Except in those very few people already on a psychological edge (in which case anything might trigger them), computer games do not make us overcome the deep taboos we have about violence. Characters like Keith Vaz might pop up on the news to play some cheap gesture politics but they're wrong to say that computer games make us more violent than the games I played as a child when buying a spud gun for a young boy was as normal as buying him a football.

Last week Grand Theft Auto 5 was finally released and I was surprised that the media were so outraged about a torture scene. I couldn't help but feel that the media again got it so very wrong. Only this time it’s because there’s much more about this game that deserves censure.

Having now seen and played GTA5, I have to admit that I’m worried. I’ve never seen such a well-crafted game so utterly ruined by unneeded sensationalism and a pervasive and deeply crass vulgarity. I’m not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, though, of course, isn’t that what prudes usually say? So perhaps I am a prude. And if I am a prude, it’s because I worry about the intellectual, moral, and emotional development of any child spending hundreds of hours in such a bleak and twisted world.

Speaking to a teacher the other day, I discovered that her school had noticed a drop in attendance the day that GTA5 was released. She even told me that many of her students had already warned her that they wouldn’t be in because they wanted to spend their day in Los Santos (the game’s thinly disguised version of Los Angeles). Now, I’m not such a stickler for education that it bothered me that kids do that. I’d prefer it if our youth made choices on their own and learned to live with the consequences. School has become a way for the state to teach us to conform and real education happens despite of school, not because of it.

Yet GTA5 is making me question my own liberal attitudes towards censorship and ratings. But let me be clear. It’s not the violence that offends me as much as the quality of life portrayed in the game. So much about the game is needlessly graphic. Take a few examples which might sound trivial when taken separately when what I’m trying to condemn is the total overwhelming ethos of the game... Within minutes of my playing the game I was listening to a radio broadcast describing two women engaged in what is more politely described as ‘water sports’. Many of the incidents in the game are also highly sexualised: one mini-game involves closing pornographic pop ups as they appear on a computer screen. Outside the building was a huge poster advertising ‘cougars’ (a term for older women who enjoy the company of younger men). It depicts a middle aged woman on her hands and knees, her breasts drooping like giant teardrops. One of the main characters is introduced screwing a woman (from behind). Another side mission involves a motorbike chasing a car but it begins with a character telling your protagonist that ‘you’re only here to suck ****’. I haven’t even bothered going into the strip joints… And then there’s the music... Even the music seems deliberately chosen to offend. Previous games had great but sometimes eclectic music mixed in with the popular. It even had Philip Glass alongside rap and hip hop and hits from the 60s. That meant that you could always skip through the music to find something to your taste. Perhaps I’m just older. Perhaps I’ve fallen unlucky in that game has no music I like. Yet there’s a difference between music I dislike and music that makes me wince.

There are few lyrics less family-friendly than Nick Cave’s ‘Henry Lee’ (a favourite of mine) but it’s a song I don’t listen to often because that stuff gets inside your brain. The music in GTA5, however, is wall-to-wall ‘fuck you’ this and ‘motherfucker’ that. The gameplay mechanic means that you’re constantly switching between cars, all playing different radio stations, so it’s hard not to suddenly find yourself listening to something that makes you pause the game to change.

The dialogue surrounding the music is also depressingly lowbrow, deeply sexualised and informed by the worst kinds of pornography. I’ve seen the ads on TV and I’m surprised they found snippet of dialogue suitable to broadcast. Yet my complaint isn’t that these elements shouldn’t be in the game. My problem is that these elements have entirely taken over the game and aren’t executed with any degree of real humour or even sauciness. Grand Theft Auto used to be the thinking man’s Saint’s Row (a game that ripped off the GTA formula but with more of a juvenile need to cause offence) but now it has chosen to adopt that Saint’s Row sensibility. Playing the game is like being stuck in the mind of a 15 year old boy and it’s every bit as bad as that sounds.

Probably the worst elements of the game involve the game’s black protagonist, Franklin Clinton. My white liberal consciousness has trouble processing these segments of the game which portrays the black experience as being almost entirely negative, racist, and deeply prejudicial. As a white liberal I’m already troubled by any use of the ‘n’ word but I’m also troubled by my being troubled by the ‘n’ word. It annoys me when I can’t use it, for example, when talking about a certain Joseph Conrad short story. Yet here, the patois of the black characters is laced with racial epithets which quickly become overwhelming.

I’m not sure I’m successfully raising my argument above the usual kind of crap spouted by members of the 'National Viewers' and Listeners'Association'. I don’t mind some element of these things in games, even if those younger than the age rating get to see them. Yet Grand Theft Auto 5 feels like a large plug has just been opened and our higher order thinking is being drained from beneath. It’s rated 18 but it’s being played by every boy upwards of 13 year old and, no doubt, probably many more much younger. The idea of children hanging around with these virtual characters is only slightly less worrying than if they were hanging out on the street corner with real gangsters, grifters, and products of the federal prison system.

It’s hard for me to equate my love for Derek and Clive, Richard Prior, Larry David, and The Thick of It with my reaction to hearing the language in GTA5 except there is a difference. The former use it to expose some absurdity about the world. GTA5 uses it to make us think that this is what the world is like. And that’s the problem. Swearing is a vital part of our linguistic machine. It allows us access to areas of the emotional register that are hard to reach with normal language. The new GTA doesn’t have emotional registers. Every other word is ‘motherfucker’, with use of the ‘n’ word so prolific that it’s impossible to justify. I’m well past my eighteenth, twenty eighth, and even thirty eighth birthdays and I have played computer games all my life. I also have a fairly liberal attitude to most things but every bone in my body tells me that this game is wrong.

For me, GTA5 is a struggle to enjoy alone, entirely unplayable in polite company, and a constant disappointment. Perhaps it exposes my own limits, the places where my taboos begin. Perhaps it’s a sign that I’m getting old. Yet I hope my reaction to this is something that is shared by people of all ages because the game attempts to push back our cultural norms, degrades us as it tries to shock us. It doesn’t teach us what we are. By entertaining our youth, it is showing them the world they’ll create. And as much as I looked forward to playing this game, I don’t want to be part of that world. I don’t want to encourage the makers even as they become the richest among us by showing us the worst parts of ourselves.