![]() It’s ironic: Despite its imposing difficulty, Flappy Bird was too easy, in a way. The penitent player, phalangyflected before Flappy Bird, might accept its invitation and flap his or her way through the pipes of its improbable temple. Writing about Flappy Bird for The Atlantic before Nguyen retired it in February, I called the game indifferent, unconcerned for the human players that were its target operators-“like an iron gate rusted shut.” But like the iron gate, Flappy Bird could still be respected and, over time, conquered. But those similarities only help make the strong contrast between the two games more evident. It certainly looks that way even the interfaces, the score display, and the visual style match almost completely. The novice player will be forgiven for thinking Swing Copters is just Flappy Bird oriented vertically. In Swing Copters, the player taps to reverse the horizontal direction of a bug-eyed peanut of a creature wearing a helicopter’s rotor, weaving back and forth to maneuver the character through gaps in scaffolds flanked by swinging mallets. ![]() In Flappy Bird, the player taps to make a bird flap and rise, piloting it through small gaps in a pipe. “It was just too addictive,” he told the Wall Street Journal. Dismayed and overwhelmed by the public response, the game’s creator, Dong Nguyen, pulled the title mere weeks later. It’s a game with a history, too: the follow-up to last winter’s unlikely hit Flappy Bird, whose surprising, abusive difficulty helped it nest at the top of the app store charts. Swing Copters is a simple mobile game that offers the layperson an experience of the divine profanity where expertise rubs up against disorder. In sport and in games, secularism is for amateurs, spiritualism for pros. Fewer, then, are our encounters with the voodoo of small variations magnified across rapidly changing conditions, and the chaos-like effect they can have on outcomes. For the rest of us, we rarely get to experience peak performance anyway. Some neuroscientists have even argued that a tendency to believe in the paranormal signals greater neurochemical capacity to perform well in the first place. There, where neither practice nor reason prevail, only appeals to the supernatural or the divine offer comfort. Swing Copters is a simple mobile game that offers the experience of divine profanity.įor top athletes (or musicians, or performers), superstition is often the best way to rationalize the apparent randomness of such situations. For those operating at peak performance in a given activity, the frequency and the effect of surprises are amplified, precisely because a failure to perform cannot be easily explained away by the chasm between intention and ability. Once all other factors are eliminated, once one’s body and experience and technique have been refined near to the maximum, still inexplicable things can happen, and they do.Ĭounterintuitively, that space where failure and success rub up against each other becomes ever more noticeable the better one becomes at his or her recreation. The answer eludes all of us who have not reached peak performance in something-which is to say most of us. What room is there for sorcery in such a practice? Athletes like Jordan and Williams and Boggs spend their entire careers honing and refining their natural talents into repeatable performance. But superstition would seem to have no place in world-class sports performance. Some casual myths are engrained into the everyday fabric of a sport-dribbling a basketball before taking a free throw, for example. ![]() Among them: He ate chicken before each game, began batting practice for night games at precisely 5:17 p.m., and inscribed “Chai,” the Hebrew word for life, into the dirt before stepping up to bat. Baseball hall of famer Wade Boggs bore a bounty of superstitions. Michael Jordan wore his University of North Carolina basketball shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform. Serena Williams bounces the tennis ball five time before her first serve, twice before the second. Many of the highest-performing professional athletes are also the most superstitious. ![]()
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