Computer games - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 189

the most popular applications for smart phones. One of the most popular of
these games is Angry Birds ( Fig. 9.16 ), developed by the Finnish company Rovio
Entertainment Limited. In the game, players launch cartoon birds from sling-
shots to destroy cartoon pigs. The two cousins who run the company, Mikael and
Niklas Hed, realized in early 2009 that the smart phone market for games was
about to take off. The cousins had developed more than fifty games before Angry
Birds and, armed with this experience, they had set out to create a game that
was entertaining for ordinary people, not just for hard-core gamers. When Niklas
saw his mother distracted from cooking the Christmas dinner by playing Angry
Birds, he realized they had a hit on their hands. He said, “She doesn't play any
games. I realized: this is it.” 11 The game became available in Apple's App Store in
December 2009, and more than twelve million copies had been sold by 2013.
The casual game FarmVille introduced a new social element into mobile
gaming by its association with the Facebook social networking site. The game
was launched by Zynga in June 2009 and reached more than ten million daily
users within six weeks. The game was inspired by a Chinese farming simulation
game called Happy Farm that allowed players to grow crops, trade with others,
sell produce, and steal from neighbors. At its peak, the game had more than
twenty million daily users in China and Taiwan. Although Happy Farm and
FarmVille have now declined in popularity, many new games are now avail-
able. In 2011, in the United States and Western Europe there were more than
sixty million casual gamers on Apple's iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad platforms
who downloaded an average of 2.5 games a month. Half of all paid and free
downloads on Apple's App Store in these countries were games. On Facebook,
more than 50 percent of users play games and there are more than 250 million
people playing games on the site every month.
Worryingly, nearly 20 percent of Facebook users say they are addicted to
playing games. Video game addiction is now becoming a real problem in many
countries. During the last decade, there have been a handful of horrific deaths
caused by serious video game addiction - deaths of players and of children being
neglected while their parents played games. In 2005, a young man in South
Korea died after playing a video game continuously for fifty hours. In 2010 a
woman in the United States was convicted of second-degree murder after she
told investigators that she had shaken her baby to death because its crying had
interrupted her playing FarmVille. As early as 1981, a bill called the Control
of Space Invaders (and other Electronic Games) Bill had been introduced into
the British Parliament and was only narrowly defeated. In 2007, the Chinese
government introduced restrictions on online gaming that required Internet
games operating in China to identify users by their resident identity numbers.
After three hours of continuous play, players under eighteen are prompted to
stop playing the game and take some physical exercise. If they continue the
game, their game points are reduced and, after five hours, all their game points
are erased. This legalistic approach is just one attempt to address the serious
problem of addiction that is accompanying the continuing rise in popularity of
computer video games.

Fig. 9.16. The idea for Angry Birds came
from one of Rovio's designers, Jaako
Iisalo. He created a screen shot showing
a cartoon flock of round birds looking
cross. One of the directors of Rovio,
Niklas Hed said: “People saw this picture
and it was just magical.” F1

Keyconcepts

Genres of computer games

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Action games

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