February 28, 2014
By Emma Carr and Olivia Byrnes
Staff Writers
People in halls of Jamesville-DeWitt High School have been chirping about Flappy Bird all month. This new and difficult-yet-addicting app is one of the many applications that keeps J-DHS students on their phones all day long.
In Flappy Bird you try and fly a cartoonish bird in between green pipes that look like they were taken out of a Super Mario Brothers game. To play you have to continuously tap the screen of your device to direct the bird around the pipes. There are no levels; the goal is to beat your highscore, so there is no end to the game.“It’s simplicity keeps me playing,” said freshman Lucas Binder. High scores in J-DHS range from 40-60 but some students get lucky and get into the hundreds like, junior Josh Frank who scored 151 points. It seems that no one can keep the J-DHS students away, even when creator Dong Nguyen tried to take it away.
Nguyen, permanently took down the app from Apple’s app store. Even though the app made around $50,000 a day, he said people had become too obsessed. “It happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever,” said Nguyen, who announced the removal of the game on Twitter. This is true of J-DHS students as well, like sophomore Grayson Burns, who said, “It’s so addicting I just want to beat my highscore, but at the same time I wish I could put it down.” Junior Cheyenne Danforth says that Flappy Bird is one the most addicting games she has ever played, even more than Angry Birds and Candy Crush. But just because the creator took down the app it doesn’t stop people from playing.
Although people who already have the game downloaded can still play, if you deleted it there is no way to get it back. “He’s a genius. It was a good marketing decision because he made so much more money,” said sophomore Connor Hylwa. Hylwa is referring to the last days that the app was available for download right Nguyen announced the removal.
This app may not be available in the App Store, but J-DHS students will always crave new high scores to beat. We agree that Flappy Bird is very addicting, but also very frustrating. It can keep you playing for hours some days, but only seconds on others. Today we think that we have gotten over our Flappy Bird craze but we also know that it will always stay on our phones.