Flappy Bird is a phenomenon and has taken the mobile game industry by storm. Not many games on the mobile platform has had such success as Flappy Bird in a matter of weeks. Of course with any success comes criticism, in this case it’s in the form of fans that say the game is cheating. Many players allege the physics are unrealistic in order to make the game more difficult. Frank Noschese decided to spend some time looking into the physics of Flappy Bird to find out according to Geek.
Noschese used Logger Pro to analyze a video taken of Flappy Bird running on the Apple iPad. With this tool he was able to track the bird’s vertical position in the app to see if it was really falling realistically. Of course that’s using the realistic assumption that the bird in the game would is about the size of a robin, which is 24cm across. This is where it gets very scientific. Noschese came up with a gravitational acceleration of 9.75m/s^2. In the real world it’s 9.8m/s^2, which is very close to reality.
The science alone shows that the game is more than realistic compared to others. Perhaps people feel cheated because other games aren’t realistic. For example, the gravitation acceleration in Angry Birds is about 25 percent of Earth, this makes it more fun to play. However, Flappy Bird doesn’t bother with trivial things like “fun.”
Another aspect to consider is the velocity after a tap says Geek. Since there is no difference in the strength of each flap, it should be uniform. However Noschese found upon further inspection that the impulse provided by the taps isn’t realistic. The upward momentum changes based on the pre-tap velocity to produce the same post-tap velocity. In real life, the change in velocity would remain constant.
So in some places Flappy Bird is realistic and is not in others. But perhaps that’s what makes the game fun. The mix of inaccurate and accurate physics is what makes Flappy Bird the annoying-fun and addictive game it is.
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