It's Just Birds

Today I've been sent an article about the cognitive complexity of the user experience of Angry Birds. I do appreciate the author's arguments, but to me the success of the game is rather due to outstanding marketing, than to any remarkably good user experience or game design.



Charles Mauro's explanation of how the game manages cognitive load and the connection he makes to the theory of flow are very impressive. However, I'd claim, like with many popular games, this success is based not on ingenuity or any disruptive change, but rather on the history of exploration in computer games and incremental recombination.

Besides being released for the iPhone and being mentioned by David Cameron (and probably a series of such events), Angry Birds doesn't get that much attention from people that have higher awareness of what has been around. And in fact it could be argued that the game is just another artillery game like Scorched Earth was 20 years ago and Worms - 10 years ago. They all have a sense of humour, some gameplay innovation and the typical casual feel. I do love the visual style of multilayered 2D perspective animation. I'd say that it expands on games like Patapon and World of Goo. Of course, there are a bunch of other cool aspects that work well on players, but to me it is difficult to name anything so unique.

As for what the author calls "mistery", I'd call extremely professional artwork. Much like the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. However, the one aspect of Angry Birds that I admire is the way they have managed to market their game, so they've earned the status of the flagship game for iPhone.