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.'"

Comments

Snake

[supersloshy]

Can we just agree that Angry Birds is the new "Snake" and move on?

Re:Snake

[PaladinAlpha]

OT, but I owe almost my entire programming career to Gorillas; it was just complex enough for an 8-year-old to make 'cool' modifications to.

The first 'development cycle' of my life was changing the explosion radius of the bananas (nuclear bananas, yeah!) and encountering dissatisfaction with the result -- the game drew a series of concentric, colored ellipses to represent the explosion, and then the same series with background color to erase them (and the damaged terrain). The ellipse-drawing library function in QBasic (understandably) has aliasing problems such that drawing radius 1, then 2, then 3, and so forth would miss some pixels which fell between the lines of the ellipses, leaving unsightly floating particles. I can't remember how I fixed it, but I think it was drawing horizontally-bounded background-colored lines down the vertical axis of the largest ellipse.

Anyway, that was the most fun I'd ever had, at the time. Now I think about that old, silly program and... want to go write a Gorillas clone *grin*. It wouldn't be the same with modern tools, though -- there was a lot of charm in that old, slow VESA pixel-juggling.

because?

[sammyF70]

"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.

Re:because?

[nepka]

It's exactly for that reason. It's always funny when people try to find some deeper reason in simple things, over-analyzing things.

Re:because?

[grub]

Very rarely parts of some houses will just fall on their own after the initial shake.
Presumably we're to read into that that the developers had poor toilet training and had sexual fantasies about their mothers and cat.

Re:because?

[Forbman]

But from a cognition standpoint, those little bits of motion attract our attention, and make us go "Hmm...I wonder...". Sure, many of us in this particular audience realize the structure sometimes needing a few moments to stabilize is a consequence of the dynamic behavior of the physics engine, but we're not the rest of everyone else who gets sucked into it. That was the point of the article.

And it is some or all of those little other things, intended to do so by the developers or not, that suck more of us in to this version of a game archetype compared to other versions.

Also, read up on the design of casinos... there's a reason why they all basically look, feel, smell and sound alike. Or grocery or department store layouts...

Re:because?

[shadowrat]

It's still a valid observation and worth noting. The author may or may not know that the shaking is due to the physics engine equalizing. His point is that it's interesting to users. Most people who play the game are not game developers. they have no experience with physics engines. They see random behavior and their brain churns it over and over again and again trying to correlate it with something. Consequently they are engaged in the game. Its technically a bug or a glitch, but it's a serendipitous one.

Angry Birds a real killer

[Spazmania]

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.

In other words,

[Baloroth]

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.

Re:wikipedia

[slapout]

Citation needed

Well, that certainly makes it unique

[elrous0]

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.

Re:How does this make the dev managers feel?

[jellomizer]

Well they target different markets. iPhone games or the Wii are best for casual gamer. Who want a quick fix then get on with their lives.

This.

[Slutticus]

"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?

Re:Redirect of effort

[Quiet_Desperation]

The iPad has revolutionized my poop time.

There's a sentence I didn't expect to type today. Or ever.

Simple, Yet Challenging

[CycleFreak]

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.)