So, my friend Joe called me up the other day, and asked me why I thought Angry Birds was addictive. The conversation resulted in this article, which then got picked up by a bunch of other places, like Kotaku, where the focus was primarily on the psych professor quoted in the article & his distaste for videogames.
Nevertheless, I wanted to expound a bit more on why I think Angry Birds is really addictive, in part because the conversation with Joe made me think about it in a slightly different way than I had before. So, for those only interested in bullet points:
- Simple, non-time-critical physical repetition
- Game physics act as an “action multiplier” & abstraction layer
- Instant iteration
So, for anyone who’s played the game, there’s the physical act of pulling back the slingshot & firing the bird. It’s easy – you aren’t forced to complete the action instantly or face death. There’s no blood, no guts, no high-level time-critical dexterity required. So a lot of the things that non-gamers perceive as barriers to entry aren’t really there. Anyone can play the game. More, it’s friendly – it’s bright, colorful, the “anger” of the birds isn’t the emo everything-brown bald-space-marine nonsense we’re so accustomed to in console gaming – it’s a charming sort of anger directed at a largely incompetent enemy.
Before getting to the physics, and why that’s important, let’s talk about iteration. When you fail in Angry Birds, you can restart instantly. Just hit “replay” and go. There’s no loading, you can do it any time, and as a result, between that and the repeated motion, you develop a sort of “muscle memory” for the actions required to complete the level.
Now, the physics – there are two aspects to why this is important, IMO. The first is that it’s basically an “action multiplier”. You just pull a slingshot & let go. Simple, relatively small-scale action. The result, though, is this cascading collapse of something much larger. Your bird hits a wall, which then breaks or falls, causing other walls to fall, smashing things, breaking apart, eliminating targets, etc. It’s a big cascade of very satisfying events, and your simple action ends up with a big result. It’s a very viscerally satisfying action – it worked in Boom Blox, and it works here, as well.
The second part of it, though, is really a combination of the incredibly fast iteration time and the fact that the physics acts as an “abstraction” between your action and the end result. Just like in Popcap’s Peggle, your ability to genuinely predict the outcome of your action is limited. Maybe you can say, “I hit that, and it’ll fall, leading to that other thing to fall,” but beyond that, it’s nigh-impossible to predict the end result, because the resulting physics is more than you can easily mentally calculate.
This is where it becomes just like a slot machine.
There was an interesting Radiolab podcast about a woman who was on Parkinson’s medication who got incredibly addicted to gambling. The jist of it is that dopamine is one of the body’s ways of helping you recognize patterns. When you see a problem where you think you can discern a pattern, you get a satisfying hit of dopamine. As you “get better” at recognizing the pattern, you get more dopamine. More satisfaction. With something like a slot machine, the problem is that it *looks* like there’s a pattern – lots of things that indicate to your body, “Hey, there’s a pattern here!” – but there isn’t.
So your body basically shoots you full of pleasure-drug, and says, “YOU MUST FIND THE PATTERN HERE!”, but you try, and try, and try… and you fail. But it feels good, so you keep going. With a slot machine, there is literally no pattern, so this can continue forever. For the subject of the podcast, the problem was that her Parkinson’s medication affected how her dopamine system worked, and the end result was that she developed a massive gambling addiction.
In Angry Birds, or Peggle, or Burnout’s old Crash Mode, there is a pattern, but it’s largely beyond your ability to actually understand. So you’re fooled into this idea that you can completely comprehend it, because you can generally comprehend the first few steps, and you can generally comprehend the overall goal – but you can’t possibly account for every step along the way. So your body gives you the dopamine hit, and encourages you to keep trying to find the pattern.
With Angry Birds’ basically instant re-start, you can get that hit again and again incredibly quickly.
And that’s why after 3 hours of trying the same handful of levels, you wonder, “What the hell did I just spend 3 hours doing?” but also realize that you couldn’t stop playing. It’s the same reason you see people up at 5am pulling on slot machine levers. Looking at them, you can’t imagine why they’d spend the entire night playing slots, but in their brains, desperately searching for a pattern they’ll never find… it’s just like they’re playing Angry Birds.
I can’t help but compare this game with Street Fighter. Both are highly addictive and have the same physics repeated over-and-over. The major difference is that the entrance barrier for Street Fighter (assuming you’re not just button mashing) is higher than Angry Birds. Think back to the first times you played Street Fighter and the satisfaction you felt as you performed your first combo. Angry Birds gets you there without much skill and a bit more luck. As you stated: It’s a big cascade of very satisfying events. (Personally, I find Angry Birds, especially on the iPhone, quite frustrating because of this luck factor. As a gamer, I don’t want luck to be a large factor.)
All the game philosophy in the world can be trotted out to explain why this or that game has mass appeal, but Rovio – whether wittingly or unwittingly – discovered the winning formula that makes AB addictive and it’s less cerebral and far more primal in its nature.
We are biologically hard wired to tend to things from a MEMG approach and AB delivers it in spades: minimum effort for maximum gain.
The more a game wants you to do this and that, or add this, be that, grow this other thing, decorate it, color it, move it all over the place, etc. the more convoluted its approach to get you to the “fun playing” part, the less appeal it’ll have to the majority of people.
Shooter games, action games and the like, while they have appeal to a lot of people, those people are already willing to spend large amounts of time studying the whole structure and story, reading handbooks and rule books and cheat forums and instructions, and creating things…but that very thing turns off mainstream players who don’t find it necessary to need to earn a college degree just to figure out the user interface.
AB, and games like Bejeweled, hit the gold right out of the gate. Neither wow you with the high end 3D model graphics, the photorealistic water, the surreal explosions and worlds. They’re nearly juvenile in artistic appeal, but you pull the sling and BAM, you’re playing. After a time or two, you work out where it should be making contact, do that, BAM, down it comes.
The physics bringing down multiple objects off one simple hit is maximum gain for minimum effort. The points allotted to the remaining birds is maximum gain for minimum effort (one shot). It scoots on along and then it sets up progressively more challenging obstacles, but now that you’ve tasted MEMG, you don’t notice the hour and a half you spent trying to figure out which bird needs to hit the cement block where, and which side, to cause that awesome chain reaction and bring it all down after a little swipe across the screen.
The games that get shared the most are the games where the player can jump right in and be rewarded, there’s immediate payoff, and you don’t have to bother other people in order to advance. Once you get the hang of it, your enthusiasm sucks in your friends. If you have to bug strangers to buy a shovel in farmville, people think you’re an idiot.
If you post excitedly about the jewel combo or the level you just nailed, and have fun, without having to start buying stuff to keep the game going, or spamming friends who could care less – people are more apt to consider and try it out.
Charge money for the game, then leave people the hell alone. One thing that reeeally irks me is how oblivious game designers/makers are about advertising. NOBODY who is sane likes ads on ANYTHING, not their websites, not their games, not their pictures, not their music, not their movies, NOTHING…yet app and game makers apparently think “monetizing” their games means forcing people to listen to or see ads that they don’t like and could care less about, tracking their behavior to find ways of spamming them with ads relevant to things they’re doing – missing the punchline: NOBODY LIKES ADS ON ANYTHING ever.
I play a game til I get ad spammed, then I uninstall it or quit and move on. I won’t buy from their advertiser sponsors, I won’t read it, I don’t listen to video ads, I mute them til my preferred content is on. To monetize a game in the most productive way is give someone immediate gratification, ask NOTHING of them in return other than to indulge and play…and invest minimum effort for maximum gain…then you won’t have to bug people with stupid ads for crap they ignore anyway…they will promote the game themselves for you. You won’t have to ask, or beg, or force.
AB free version has ads, but it’s also a simple maneuver to hit reload one time and it’ll go away… ;-p
PS
And that’s why after 3 hours of trying the same handful of levels, you wonder, “What the hell did I just spend 3 hours doing?” but also realize that you couldn’t stop playing. It’s the same reason you see people up at 5am pulling on slot machine levers. Looking at them, you can’t imagine why they’d spend the entire night playing slots, but in their brains, desperately searching for a pattern they’ll never find… it’s just like they’re playing Angry Birds.
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Yeah, but the difference is, nobody’s losing their houses and jobs or having their utilities shut off from lack of payment after blowing bank accounts at the casino with Angry Birds ;-p