Flappy bird - game over

On February 9th, the creator of Flappy Bird, a Vietnamese 29 year old, Dong Nguyen announced on Twitter "I am sorry Flappy Bird users, 22 hours from now, I take Flappy Bird down, I cannot take this any more." He went ahead with his threat and deleted the game despite earning £30,000 a day. The game had been downloaded 50 million times. Apparently it took him two to three days to make the game, so thats an incredible return on investment and he was set up for life. Why on earth did he remove the game?

When Nguyen was interviewed by the press on his reasons for deleting the game he told them "Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed.....but it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem." Apparently he felt he was selling the equivalent of drugs, and that bothered him. He even received death threats from paranoid Flappy Bird users which simply reinforced his view that the game was destructive rather than positive. Wow! Here's a programmer who has hit jack pot with a game making £30,000 a day yet for ETHICAL reasons he takes the game down.

This week former Essex cricketer, Mervyn Westfield, was found guilty of taking a bribe of £6000 from a betting syndicate. According to the Independent newspaper he was caught when he "unguardedly" confessed to a fellow player. He now travels around speaking to young sportsmen warning them of the consequences of bad choices. This is a classic example of the human conscience, we each have a part of us that knows right from wrong, and it is like a voice that speaks to us from within. Clearly Mervyn felt the weight of his wrong choices and made amends.

A Polish proverb says "the conscience is the voice of the soul." In my opinion this is one argument for the existence of God, often called The Moral Argument. In every culture throughout history people know some things are right and some are wrong. Atheists might tell us its just social conditioning but we all know murder and rape are morally wrong. Even when cultures lose track of their moral compass (think Nazi Germany and the Holocaust) we all agree that they became deaf to their conscience. When I speak to teens about this, they all accept it as fact and say things like "I knew it was wrong but just did it anyway!" Why do we do this? Why is there a wrestling match between the angel on one shoulder and devil on the other? Could it be that we are in a fight between good and evil, and each soul has a decision to make about which voice to listen to? It was John Henry Newman, a catholic bishop who said conscience is “the voice of God in the heart of man that needs training and experience for its strength, growth and due formation.”

And where is God in all this, is he at a distance just waiting on us to slip up? Surely he cares about the decisions we make? In fact there is nothing more he can do to help us, he has provided the most hands on, powerful and guaranteed solution to the problem. The conscience may feel at times like its in a wrestling match but God has unfairly changed the odds totally in our favour. What am I talking about? Jesus of course! He came as the ultimate warrior in the fight against the manipulation of evil.

In the bible it says that in Jesus "we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). That's a cool trick, tempted but no sin. How did he do that because there is a lot of temptation out there? The simple answer is Jesus was God but he was also human, so what made the difference? What was his secret weapon? The short answer is, he was close to his Father and empowered by the Spirit. That means we have the same potential to shape our life around the same priorities as Jesus. Does this sound impossible? Its not, if a Vietnamese game maker can listen to their conscience and give up £30,000 a day, you can (with God's help) face your moral decisions with the same conviction. And when you and I fail, we have the goodness of God to lead us back to where we want to live. Of course, we are not meant to face things alone, so my advice would be, find a community to belong to where you watch out for each other, and believe the best in each other.