If you haven’t noticed, hostile avians are everywhere.
I’m not talking about the kind Hitchcock made famous, of course. I’m talking about their digital descendants in the wildly popular casual video game Angry Birds.
A couple of weeks ago at church, I noticed that one of my 4-year-old son’s friends in the row in front of us was being remarkably well behaved. When I peered around to see what he was doing, he’s plinking away with his index finger at Angry Birds on his parents’ iPhone, utterly captivated by the game.
He’s hardly the only one. The game’s publisher, Rovio, announced this week that Angry Birds has now been downloaded a staggering 350 million times.
To put that number in perspective, the best-selling music album of 2011 thus far, Adele’s 21, has sold about 3 million copies. This silly, er, angry, little video game has moved more than 100 times as many units.
I realize that comparing music and video games is a seriously apples-to-oranges endeavor. Still, I think it helps to put things in perspective regarding just how remarkably pervasive this game really is.
And if those download figures aren’t impressive enough, Andrew Stalbow, Rovio’s general manager in North America, says his company is also moving 1 million plush toys and T-shirts based on the game … every month.
I confess I haven’t actually played the game (probably because I don’t own any of the platforms upon which I might play it). But it seems like I might be in the minority on that one if these numbers are any indication.
That said, the game’s download figures do prompt me to ponder the reasons for its enormous popularity.
I don’t want to psychoanalyze our culture too much—after all, it’s a pretty simple little game from what I’ve seen. But I wonder if Angry Birds’ ubiquitous presence on smartphones and iPads everywhere says something about our collective need to momentarily decouple from our frenzied, pressured, anxiety-ridden life. Sometimes, it seems, we just need an escape for a few minutes, and this unsophisticated-but-compelling little game is apparently filling that bill … for more people than reside in the United States of America.
Recent Comments