Flappy Bird

This project reimagines the classic Flappy Bird as a controlled experimental paradigm: a simple, effortful game used to study one of the most everyday — and least understood — aspects of motivation: the decision to persist or disengage.

The Game

Players guide a bird avatar through a series of pipe obstacles by clicking to make it fly, while gravity pulls it steadily down. Progress is marked by checkpoints along the way, and the goal is to reach a coin at the end of the level. Every time the bird crashes, the trial restarts — but not automatically. Instead, players are given a choice: persist in the same level for a full reward, or disengage and switch to an easier, less rewarding version of it.

This single design choice — inserting a decision point after every failure — turns a simple arcade game into a window onto effort regulation. Level length (short vs. long) and difficulty were systematically varied, and every choice was tracked along with the full mouse trajectory leading up to it.

Research Questions

• Does persistence decline with repeated failure and time-on-task, consistent with fatigue?
• Does proximity to the goal make people more willing to keep trying?
• Does an early success (clearing the first checkpoint) have an outsized effect on later persistence?
• Can we see hesitation and decision conflict directly in how the cursor moves toward "persist" versus "disengage" — even before the choice is made?

By combining behavioral choices with movement-based measures of decision dynamics, this project treats persistence not as a single yes/no outcome, but as a process that can be traced, moment to moment, in how a decision is made.