'Mr Jump' Is the Worst Possible Evolution of Mobile Gaming

I am not on a first name basis with Mr Jump, even though I have spent far too much time with him. I only know that I do not like him and I know that he represents the worst of mobile gaming; a logical, maddening, and ultimately soulless evolution of the tap-the-screen, fail, repeat phenomenon started by Flappy Bird.

Flappy Bird was an innocent, perhaps accidental phenomenon. Mr Jump, the diabolical, iOS-only creation of French developer 1Button, is not. It's cold, calculated, and ultimately successful, of course.

It's the same type of game, and was obviously inspired by Flappy Bird. Mr Jump runs to the right of the screen, avoiding lava pits and spikes and flipping switches and using a couple power ups to complicate the whole process. Beating a level of Mr Jump requires you to tap your iPhone screen between 30 and maybe 100 times at precisely specific intervals for precisely specific durations. Mr Jump has basically three types of jumps: a long press will keep him in the air for longer, whereas a quick tap will bump him into the air long enough to get over small obstacles.

If you fuck up at any point, you must restart the level.

And you will fuck up, lots and lots of times. The game is nothing if not perfectly and cruelly designed, with a lightning fast framerate, nice graphics, and, worst of all, the ability to instantly restart a level over and over and over and over again until your thumbs hurt. Mr Jump will die thousands of times but Mr Jump will never die, really. He will never slow down, he will never consider not running so damn fast, he will never consider carefully navigating over a small spike or not smashing his face into a wall. Mr. Jump does not stop.

The only way to stop playing Mr Jump is to beat its 24 levels, which seems more merciful than the endlessness of Flappy Bird but is ultimately not.

Beating any given level can take hundreds of attempts, each of which might last between one and maybe 20 seconds or so. Beating the game will inevitably take you many hours, perhaps dozens and dozens of hours. Flappy Bird drove hordes of people mad, to the point where its creator, Dong Nguyen, took it off the App Store because he said it was "too addictive." 1Button understandably has no such moral compass: It's a free to play game with very few ads that makes its money by charging people a buck to skip levels they can't beat. And it seems to be working!

The game was downloaded more than 6 million times the week after it was released (back in March) and remains an "Editor's Choice" in the App Store. It's got glowing, albeit annoyed reviews that use the word "maddening" a lot. I downloaded it on a whim, when I was setting up an old iPhone.

This proved to be a huge mistake. Soon after downloading the game, I went to Cuba, where I spent three weeks more-or-less disconnected from the internet, with lots of long bus rides, line-standing, and beach-sitting to giving me plenty of time to occupy.

There's only so many books you can read, only so much small talk with strangers to be had—at some point, you've got to turn to the mindless entertainment that comes from a smartphone game. Unfortunately, Mr Jump and the also-not-good-but-critically-acclaimed-and-popular Fallout Shelter were the only games I had the foresight to download.

And so I spent hours with it, mindlessly tapping my screen. I did not have fun—instead, I had a sensation I've never had with any game I've ever played. I felt my brain being literally programmed to succeed in this game. Instead of reacting to what I was seeing on the screen, I was simply committing the taps to muscle memory, eventually inching further into each level. As I died hundreds, thousands of times, I was making slow but steady progress as the hours ticked away.

That's my main problem with Mr Jump. Our editor-in-chief, Derek Mead, raised the point that timed jumps are nothing new in gaming—super jumps on Super Mario RPG were notably infuriating—but rarely has a game's entire conceit been so devoid of creativity, so perfectly designed to make your synapses fire to move the muscle in your thumb to tap, tap, tap at the pre-ordained times at the pre-ordained pressures to earn the preprogrammed win-state. There is no randomness, no beauty in beating a level of Mr Jump. There is no artificial intelligence. Every single time you beat a level, it will look like this, with no variability whatsoever:

It's not fun, and it's not a game. It's a cold, cold algorithm that takes advantage of whatever dopamine rush humans get by strictly following orders down to a T, its goal being to make you every bit as robotic as the code that operates the game.

I have been a lifelong gamer, but I am finding it hard to consider Mr Jump anything other than A Waste of Time. I am certain that if a neurologist did a brain scan before you played Mr Jump and immediately after, he or she would find many things worth publishing. This does not comfort me or make me think that Mr Jump is worth spending any amount of time playing. Mr Jump and whatever jumping characters he inspires must fall into a pit of fire, and they must not ever, ever re-emerge to jump again.