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A Cognitive Teardown of Angry Birds
Hugh Pickens writes "The 50 million individuals who have downloaded 'Angry Birds' play roughly 200 million minutes of the game a day, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year, more than ten times the 100 million hours spent creating Wikipedia over the entire life span of the online encyclopedia. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Charles L. Mauro performs a cognitive teardown of the user experience of Angry Birds and concludes that the game is engaging, in fact addictive, due to the carefully scripted expansion of the user's mental model of the strategy component and incremental increases in problem/solution methodology. The birds are packed with clever behaviors that expand the user's mental model at just the point when game-level complexity is increased ... For example, why are tiny bananas suddenly strewn about in some play sequences and not in others? Why do the houses containing pigs shake ever so slightly at the beginning of each game play sequence? Why is the game's play space showing a cross section of underground rocks and dirt? One can spend a lot of time processing these little clues, consciously or subconsciously. 'Creating truly engaging software experiences is far more complex than one might assume, even in the simplest of computer games,' writes Mauro. 'You go Birds! Your success certainly makes others Angry and envious.'"
/thread
Can we just agree that Angry Birds is the new "Snake" and move on?
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
"Why do the houses containing pigs shake ever so slightly at the beginning of each game play sequence? " because box2D or whatever engine Angry Birds uses needs to stabilize the simulation? Meh .. maybe I'm just too prosaic.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
It takes no thought and works for clearing my head during a commute when I don't have the energy to think about work. Just like every other iphone game, nothing specific about angry birds here. It was just one of the first good ones.
If a waking lifetime is around 450,000 hours then at 1,200,000,000 hours Angry Birds consumes nearly 2,700 lifetimes per year.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
It's a pretty well made game. Lots of visual clues, depth of strategy, and a smooth learning curve. Really, while hard to do, it's not that hard to analyze. "Mental model of the strategy component"? I'm thinking your just trying to justify a degree there.
Now, if you can take that and make a good game, I'd be impressed. Just saying in long, complex sentences with technical words what any decent game reviewer can tell you already is not impressive. Or news.
Oh, and the crappy plays on words are definitely not making me like this story any better.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I had a wikipedia page, but it didn't meet their notability guidelines and was deleted.
It would be fantastic if all of that time (100M hrs?!?!) was recaptured into some meaningful or valuable effort. Even if it was a stupid game maybe having that effort stored into stirring pots of rice for hungry children in the 3rd world would be a good use of time.
more than ten times the 100 million hours spent creating Wikipedia over the entire life span of the online encyclopedia
Well, there were 200 million hours spent, but they were deleted as not-noteworthy
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Although I played it for a while, it always seemed to me like an impeded game of tanks. Not being able to enter an angle and power just became frustrating. My fat finger wasn't an accurate way to control avian ordnance whilst stood on a packed train so I gave up. I'd say i got some of my "life" back; but that isn't possible when commuting to and from work.
So now a bird in the hand is worth 10 in the brushy labyrinth that is Wikipedia.
For a second, I thought "it would be cool if the guys behind the new CoD could read this and learn a bit"...
But then I thought that they would just make X sequels of CoD where the first one is innovating and the rest are the same rules applied over and over again because they work.
This breakdown of the game, part by part, must look like some kind of a miracle recipe for those who want a quick buck (read: every CEO out there).
The birds are packed with clever behaviors that expand the user's mental model at just the point when game-level complexity is increased ...
Translation: The game gets harder as you go along.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You know the standard console games, the dedicated gamers, people who plunk down $2000 on a cool looking case for the PC, constantly looking for more graphics card performance, immersive gaming experience ... And these dev managers kept giving them what they want. Then Wii shows up with rudimentary graphics, trivial gaming strategies, but with a new user interface. Rocks the world and kicks the pants off the traditional gaming platform. Then this angry birds. Seemingly trivial game that a self-described "gamer" would not even deign to take a second look at, and it is played by more people than the population of China! Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can explain it. You deconstruct it. You can do Monday morning quarterbacking and make a cogent theory that describes it well, may be even accurately. But, there were professional software development managers. Working for XBox, and Sony Playstations, constantly looking for new ideas, new games, new strategies, new ways to expand their marketplace... All of them flunked. They did not see Wii coming. They did not see the Angry Birds coming. Why?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Nintendo made a loss. The 3DS tanked and Wii sales are dropping.
The problem with going after casual users is that they are fickle. I got to buy new games to justify my expensive gaming rig. But a casual player? Here today, gone tomorrow.
Oh and it is Angry Birds that is hurting Nintendo the most.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Their is some value in understanding just how powerful iterative learning tied with reward is.
Of course this is way easier to apply to a game then to real life subjects, but we could try.
Imagine a computer programming tutorial game. Problems are thrown at your to solve by writing a function, class, whatever. Successful unit tests bring rewards and so on.
Functions written in the early parts of the game could be used in subsequent challenges if not required. Use of them brings bonuses, achievements, etc. The faster your code runs the better...so replay would include rewriting older versions of your functions as to improve performance.
There are plenty of games out there for children around school subjects, etc, but I rarely see them marketed at adults. Could modern warfare 3 not actually teach something as the game play goes....seems like language would be a good fit. You have to interact with characters in the game with more and more complicated version of some language to proceed. Start with having to say hi to a guard in whatever language, end the game having to convince him your not a spy.
I guess the real point is creating a better sense of achievement and combining entertainment to overcome the usual tediousness associated with learning. I liked learning how to code because every time the compiler reported no errors it was like completing a level of angry birds. I can't say the same for economics and for many I'm sure they got no pleasure from cracking a calculus problem.
Fact: Lots of time is wasted playing video games.
Let's waste a lot more time analyzing why!
(In other news - why in God's name does my browser still think I live in Canada - it marks "analyze" as mispelled.)
it's like the game in the ST:TNG episode (the one where Wesley Crusher saved the Enterprise)
..that the popularity was because it's one of the few games that is easy to pick up and play and which works well with a touchscreen interface. The challenge is only interesting for those who like to beat games. I would suspect that most players just like the ability to pick it up and play.
This is a prime example a black swan. "The event is a surprise and has a major impact. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight." Its a normal problem of tipping point studies and knowledge propagation. An otherwise good game goes viral and suddenly the circles of those who know about it expand exponentially until everybody does. Rationalization and questions after the fact. "Why did it spread, why is it so amazing". Its cheap. Its easy to get. Its easy to communicate why its fun. It has low bariers for starting to play. It has emergent depth. Yay.
Navel gazing about how the buildings shake doesn't illuminate why it actually spread.
It's good for people who enjoy that genre, whatever it is, but I don't really enjoy the game that much. There's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to games, even casual ones. I kinda prefer something like Dragon Quest on these devices.
From one of TFAs: "The developers at Rovio took existing gameplay, presented it in a unique style, and sold it to people who would never have looked twice at Crush the Castle or the games from which it had been derived." So Rovio is just like Apple then! Maybe Rovio's boss should be the new Steve Jobs.
-- Cheers!
... I remember playing Gorilllas on QBASIC almost 15 years ago... that game was 1,000% better than Angry birds, which is nothing more than a trivial distraction
"seconds are consumed as the pigs teeter, slide and roll off planks or are crushed under slow falling debris. "
This, this and this. There is something very satisfying about watching a structure teeter at the brink and then fall over in a spectacle of smashing debris.
Also, the other day i figured out that i could topple a tower by timing a bird strike to correspond with the pendular motion of the structure after an initial strike. It blew my shit away....that realization.....the satisfaction of that......the simplicity of it.... It's a good simple game, can't we just enjoy it?
Easy: casual gamers got bored of FarmVille.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
This. It's just an accessible, well-known game you can kill time/trance out with. People are freaking out about it being some kind of amazing formula to make millions but really it's just what Windows Solitaire has been for so many years. This time someone was able to monetize it, but at this point that lesson isn't useful until the next big platform shift, and even then you'll probably be headed off at the pass by Angry Birds' momentum.
Sendou Wave Kick!!
While it is interesting to see a UI expert dissect a piece of software, this piece reminds me a bit of folks who do analysis of lottery ticket numbers and then try to convince us that the winners are geniuses. We all know of a bazillion games that are similar shoot-projectile-random-result games (golf, bowling, Bloons, Peggle, Darts) and why they are addictive. Angry Birds is good, but the amazing success probably has more to do with social mania than UI design. OH, and hitching your corporate bandwagon to the iOS.
and 45 angry birds in about the same time as reading this article and posting this comment - sad that my Karma here still sucked bad!
I installed on my Android tablet (Acer Iconia, btw). I have not played games since Quake II - yeah, I'm old(er). But I thought I'd try it out just to see what all the hype was about.
Here's why I keep playing it: Learning the game was fast and the controls are intuitive. I can fire it up in seconds, play a few levels and be done. I don't feel like I need to invest hours in it just to get good at it. But the game itself is actually enjoyable and satisfying to play. Look, after a day of stress at work, I don't really want to "work" at playing a game. I want to relax and have some fun. The graphics are well done and the sounds made by the birds and pigs are humorous. Even after playing it for weeks, I still giggle a little at the sound effects.
But really, the biggest thing is that the game is good for time-fill rather than time-suck. Also, let's face it: There are millions (billions?) more people who are not "gamers" than there are "gamers". (Too many quotes? Possibly.)
Cool. It's literary criticism for games, where anything can mean anything.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
i wold guess that those figures are way WAY off. 1. 50M downloads or users? 2. 4 minutes day/ every day /the whole year? really?, i beated every level in about 5 hours total,(all the android versions, and im bad at it) TFA assumes a average use of 24h.16m per user per year. that seems like way over reality for me.
my guess would be around 1/4 or 1/5th of the given figure, still a lot tough.
I played it once for five minutes, got bored and quit.
A relevant read: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/go-away-birds.php
"For example, why are tiny bananas suddenly strewn about in some play sequences and not in others? Why do the houses containing pigs shake ever so slightly at the beginning of each game play sequence? Why is the game's play space showing a cross section of underground rocks and dirt?"
Add another proof to the Connoisseur conjecture - http://xkcd.com/915/
I8-D
They're missing the real reason for the success of Angry Birds: The music is a hypnotic ear-worm with mind-control properties. That, and you get to smash things. No one is safe from such a devious combination!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
And that's a lot. And it's important to you if anyone you care about spends a lot of time playing it.
If you disagree, then please think about this serious and NON-GODWIN (I mean that, dammit!) question: was Hitler important?
remember that old game included in all early windows installations--banana.exe? that's where birds came from
I play it when I have nothing else I can possibly do. Like on a bus going to work. When I'm bored and can't read or anything else. I have my phone with me, I can occupy myself by playing Angry Birds. I expect that reason alone is a big one for the high number of hours it is played.
I think you mean Finns.