Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive . Today it has been downloaded, in its various forms, more than 7. It has also inspired a disturbingly robust merchandising empire: films, T- shirts, novelty slippers, even plans for Angry Birds “activity parks” featuring play equipment for kids. For months, a sign outside my local auto- repair shop promised, “Free Angry Birds pen with service.” The game’s latest iteration, Angry Birds Space, appeared a couple weeks ago with a promotional push from Wal- Mart, T- Mobile, National Geographic Books, MTV and NASA.

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I spent my formative years becoming fluent in, and addicted to, the video games of the ’8. Mario Brothers to Mortal Kombat. You could say that video games and I went through adolescence together. As I shed my exoskeleton of fat, Nintendo’s blocky pixels started to fuse into sleek 6. Photo. Credit. Illustration by Aled Lewis At some point late in my teens, in a spasm of post- adolescent resolve, I decided to renounce video games forever.

They had, I recognized, a scary power over me — an opium kind of power — and I was hoping to cultivate other, more impressive ways of spending my time. I had aspirations of capital “c” culture, and so I started pouring my attention into books, a quieter and more socially respected form of escapism. I knew that, if I had daily access to video games, I would spend literally every day playing them, forever. So I cut myself off, more or less cold turkey, and as a result I was more or less happy and productive. Then, midway through the dark forest of my adult life, the i.

Phone came out. This presented a unique problem. It was not only a phone and a camera and a compass and a map and a tiny window through which to see the entire Internet — it was also a pocket- size game console three times as sophisticated as anything I grew up with. My wife, who had never been a serious gamer, got one and became addicted, almost immediately, to a form of off- brand digital Scrabble called Words With Friends. Before long she was playing 6 or 1. Sometimes I would lose her in the middle of a conversation: her phone would go brinnng or pwomp or dernalernadern- dern, and she would look away from me, midsentence, to see if her opponent had set her up for a triple word score. I tried to stay good- humored. I told her I was going to invent something called the i.

Paddle: a little screen- size wooden paddle that I would slide in front of her phone whenever she drifted away, on the back of which, upside- down so she could read them, would be inscribed humanist messages from the analog world: “I love you” or “Be here now.”Inevitably, my high- minded detachment didn’t last long. About a year ago, unable to resist the rising cultural tide and wanting (I convinced myself) a camera with which to take pictures of my children, I gave in and bought an i.

Phone. For a while I used it only to read, to e- mail and to take pictures. Then I downloaded chess, which seemed wholesome enough — the PBS of time- wasters. But chess turned out to be a gateway game.

Once I formed the habit of finding reliable game joy in my omnipresent pocket- window, my inner 1. I downloaded horribly titled games like Bix (in which you steer a dot in a box between other dots in a box) and Mi. Zoo (in which you make patterns out of exotic cartoon animal heads).

These led to better, more time- consuming games — Orbital, Bejeweled, Touch Physics, Anodia — which led to even better games: Peggle, Little Wings. One tiny masterpiece, Plants vs. Zombies, ate up, I’m going to guess, a full “Anna Karenina” of my leisure time. One day while I was playing it (I think I had just discovered that if you set up your garlic and your money- flowers exactly right, you could sit there racking up coins all day), my wife reminded me of my old joke about the i.

Paddle. This made me inexplicably angry. Photo. Credit. Illustration by Aled Lewis And so video games were back in my life. My plunge into the world of stupid games was not mine alone: over the last few years, millions of people have been sucked into that vortex.

As the venture capitalist John Doerr told Vanity Fair last summer, “These games are not for everyone, it’s true, but it’s for more of everyone than anything else I know.” In 2. Rovio’s chief executive claimed that Angry Birds players were spending 2.

A number like that can’t tell us, however, about the quality of those minutes; how many of them were fun or fulfilling or even intentional. Humans have always played stupid games. Dice are older than recorded history. Ancient Egyptians played a board game called Senet, which archaeologists believe was something like sacred backgammon. We have rock- paper- scissors, tick- tack- toe, checkers, dominoes and solitaire — small, abstract games in which sets of simple rules play out in increasingly complex scenarios. They required human opponents or at least equipment — the manipulation of three- dimensional objects in space. When you sat down to play them, chances were you meant to sit down and play them.

Photo. Credit. Illustration by Aled Lewis Stupid games, on the other hand, are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 4. For most of the last 2.

The game industry operated on a Hollywood model: big companies invested heavily in the production of what came to be known as “Triple- A” games, the industry equivalent of summer blockbusters, which were designed to be played mainly on consoles (Play. Station, Xbox, Dreamcast and Game. Cube). Like summer blockbusters, these games usually involved quests and wars and bombastic special effects that made them appealing to teenage boys. A Triple- A game could have a production budget of $2. On the strength of this model, video- game revenue more than doubled from 1. Halo, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and Battlefield. There was a downside, however, to the Hollywood model, which was that the industry fell prey to all the complaints people had been making for decades about Hollywood.

The huge budgets and time investments created a conservative, risk- averse culture. Everything was about imitations, spinoffs, prequels, sequels and even subsequels. How To Install Bluetooth On Macbook Pro here. There is not only a Halo 3 but an entirely separate game called Halo 3: ODST. Games were much easier to develop and easier to distribute through Apple’s app store. Instead of just passing their work around to one another on blogs, independent game designers suddenly had a way to reach everyone — not just hard- core gamers, but their mothers, their mailmen and their college professors. Consumers who never would have put a quarter into an arcade or even set eyes on an Xbox 3. How To Install Electric Fan Thermostat'>How To Install Electric Fan Thermostat.

Photo. Credit. Illustration by Aled Lewis This had a profound impact on game design. In the era of consoles, most games were designed to come to life on a stationary piece of furniture — a television or a desktop computer. The games were built accordingly, around long narratives (quests, wars, the rise and fall of civilizations) that could be explored comfortably while sitting cross- legged on a living- room carpet. Smartphone games are built on a very different model. The i. Phone’s screen is roughly the size of a playing card; it responds not to the fast- twitch button combos of a controller but to more intuitive and intimate motions: poking, pinching, tapping, tickling. This has encouraged a very different kind of game: Tetris- like little puzzles, broken into discrete bits, designed to be played anywhere, in any context, without a manual, by any level of player. The Angry Birds creators like to compare their game with Super Mario Brothers.

But the first and simplest level of Super Mario Brothers takes about a minute and a half to finish. The first level of Angry Birds takes around 1.