Some of my readers may have celebrated New Year’s under the balmy twenty-four hour sunlight of Antarctica, which would explain why they haven’t heard of “Angry Birds”. The rest of you don’t have an excuse for being so sadly out of the loop, but your being so does provide a fine reason for me to fill you in. Wikipedia, most useful as an elaborator on all topical phenomena, succinctly offers this summary: Angry Birds is a puzzle video game developed by Finland-based Rovio Mobile, in which players use a slingshot to launch birds at pigs stationed on or within various structures, with the intent of destroying all the pigs on the playfield…. Players may re-attempt levels as many times as they wish, and may also replay completed levels in an attempt to boost their score.

It has been a very long time since I’ve encountered a game as addictive as this one, which certainly makes the question “why?” of personal interest. But Wikipedia’s explication adds that there are currently over four million hours per day worldwide spent playing “Angry Birds”, and that over 50 million people have downloaded the game for their iToys, Androids, or other similar platforms. So my addiction is not unique, which broadens that “why?” question. Two days ago the Mac App store opened, which allows Mac users to buy apps online from a single source. I checked it this morning, and not to my surprise, the top selling program across all categories, was “Angry Birds”. The addiction is real.

Part of the appeal is the design of the game: you solve a series of levels, (about 400 levels altogether, divided into about a dozen sections) and each level has to be solved before you can unlock the next. The game is delightfully easy to work with: you can restart a level at any point, so you might restart immediately after missing the first shot. Each level has two phases: the first is trying to figure out how one might solve the level: what are the targets for each shot? How can I best use the different birds, each of which has unique qualities? The second phase is execution, when I know what shots I need to make, and try to make them.

I’m surprised how different are the emotions generated by the two. The first is fun, the second frustration. The second part lasts far longer, and is probably pretty similar psychologically to the rat pressing the lever over and over to get the cocaine payoff. It’s the endorphin rush that happens when I finally do solve the level that makes it worth while. Then I tell myself, “I’ll just look at the next level”, and then we’re into the fun part of it and by the time I’m out of that and into frustration I just keep going, because that big endorphin hit might be only one shot away. It’s curious how even though the process is frustrating, the game would be utterly boring if I could solve it easily at first attempt. Of course “solving” a level is a relative term. I often go back to earlier levels on which I only got one or two stars, to try to get my score on them up to three stars, which is the top. And there are some levels I had to try over 100 times before solving them though there’s been none thus far I haven’t eventually solved.

Part of the appeal is that while the game itself is very large (I had a little panel flash up, telling me I’d gotten an award for completing 15 hours of “Angry Birds”, and I was certainly not 20% of the way through) you can restart at any level. That means I can lie to myself that I’m only going to spend five minutes solving the next level, and then go back to work. It certainly makes the game more appealing than old school games (Pac-Man, Jump-Man, etc) in which “restart” means “from the beginning”. And if I am 20% of the way through after 15 hours on a $4.99 game, that means I’m paying about 7¢ a minute to be entertained.

The game is so absorbing because it’s a combination of mental skills (How do I attack this fortress? Where’s its weakness?), physical skills (I need to duplicate that last shot, but tap the screen to drop the bomb just a bit earlier), and old-fashioned luck (If I hit the TNT barrel, the rocks will fly up, and they may land on the pigs… or they may not.)I certainly find “Angry Birds” a wonderful escape. Is that a good thing? I guess it depends what the alternative is. I can say it’s wasted time because I should have been writing the Great Canadian Dog Novel, but as a way of passing time while sitting on a New York bound bus, it seemed pretty good.

You may not need to spend your time playing this game. But you may need to know something about it, if only to pick up the increasing number of references to it. It was the Game of the Year in 2010, and Google lists just under 36 million references to it online. (I’m assuming that all uses of the phrase “Angry Birds” refer to the game. Perhaps it’s only 35 million.) How ubiquitous has the game become? Enough that a satiric Israeli TV show (‘Eretz Nehederet’ A Wonderful Country) did a very funny skit on Israeli/Palestinian peace negotiations as an attempt to get the pigs and birds to stop fighting and divide up the eggs fairly. (It was never made clear who was which animal, which given the tref/haram nature of pigs was probably the safer route.) But the audience must have gotten the joke, and the youtube video has been seen over 3.5 million times, so there is an audience.

There are two sorts of people: those who love playing games,and those who find them silly time-wasters. It may be worth noting that we all start out as members of the first group, before some of us choose to defect to the second. Obligatory Ben Franklin quotation: “We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing”. But if you’re in the first group still, and have that itch that only a really good play session will relieve, check out “Angry Birds”. And when you get stuck and decide a level is utterly impossible, you can go to a cheat website that has videos of each level being solved, so you can see exactly what you have to do. Not that I’d ever use a site like that, of course. At least not till after I’ve tried this level just a few times more.