Angry Birds Farmville And Other Hyperaddictive Stupid Games Analysis
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“Just One More Game…: Angry Birds, Farmville, and Other Hyperaddictive Stupid Games,” is an article by Sam Anderson that was published in the New York Times in April of 2012. The article explains how games used to be a social an primal experience but have more recently evolved into something we do accidentally that takes time away from our everyday lives. He calls these games “stupid.” Anderson starts out the article with the 1989 release of the Game Boy and Tetris bundle, and describes how it, “promised to set gamers loose … from the tyranny of rec room and pizza parlors and arcades” (65). He describes how this bundle of portable console and game was the start of a tradition called “stupid games.” Anderson goes on to say that the small addictive games that followed the release of Tetris mixed with the rise of smart phones have changed the video-game industry. The first example is about a game that came out twenty years after the release of the Game Boy. Angry Birds was released in 2009 by a company called Rovio. Within months of release it “became the most popular game on the iPhone” (66). Anderson states that the game had been downloaded in various ways more than 700 million times.…show more content… He then says that these games are different than the “stupid games” we have now and says, “pre-Tetris games were different in a primal way...When you sat down to play them, chances were you meant to sit down and play them” (66). The “stupid games” we have nowadays have evolved from something we purposely do. Anderson explains that modern stupid games “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” (66). That idea is backed by multiple examples of people, mainly him and his wife, accidentally playing games and furthermore, getting addicted to