Filed Under ‘games’

March 23, 2011

Don’t feed the birds.

I had never played Angry Birds, and after hearing so much about it I opened it up and started flinging the small feathered cannon balls at the pigs.

I was hooked.

I downloaded the iPhone version of the game on my walk back from the store. For the next few weeks I started to build my Angry Birds legacy. Every trip on the subway turned into an epic battle to find a seat – AB is best played with two hands, virtually impossible to do when you have to sacrifice one hand to hold on to a pole to stay balanced during the ride.

While I was on vacation I hardly played AB. It was a good break from the addictive behavior I had developed in the weeks prior, but I soon found other ways to suffice my addiction. In Austin I met a few of the AB makers. I threw my arms around one of the poor guys and thanked him for “making the magic.” In exchange for my fandom, and perhaps to stop me from creeping up on him again, he gave me a stuffed angry bird that’s also a slingshot. I was delighted!

But why am I addicted?

A quick Google search yeilds plenty of reviews of the game, each author dissecting the challenging and successful components of the game:

The best explanation comes from Rovio CEO Mikael Hed in an interview, The Origins of Angry Birds. He says:

There’s this old wisdom: It has to be easy to pick up and play but hard to master. The “easy to learn” part was really important to us. When you see one screenshot of the game you know what you have to do. Angry Birds is simple, but it still has depth. It has to be so much fun that players want to return to the game over and over again. Angry Birds achieved precisely that.

Learning Through Play

Now that I’m back from vacation I’ve been balancing my AB playing with other, more productive activities like reading books and working on my thesis. If I asked Jane McGonigal, she would tell me that playing AB is productive in its own way.

I suppose I am learning a few things.

  • Strategy – It’s easy to throw birds willy nilly into the structures. With a little luck I’ll knock everything down eventually, but the excitement comes from the challenge to strategically  throw all the birds in the optimal arrangement.
  • Physics – Sometimes the game’s physics are a little off, like when a pig goes rolling off a platform for no apparent reason. Otherwise it’s a great lesson in how structures are stabilized, and how I can efficiently destroy them.
  • Cuteness / Empathy / Relationship Building – After a failed attempt in a level the remaining pigs stick their teeth out, as if to say, “ha ha ha! sucka!” It’s subtle, funny and adorable, and it makes me want to destroy them even more in round two. The more I play, the anthropomorphized interactions between birds and pig become familiar to me, affecting the way I go about strategizing their demise.

For now I’m going to keep my playing in check. If you see me on the subway I might overlook your presence. It’s not you, it’s just the challenge and joy of Angry Birds consuming all of my attention.

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