What I learned playing Angry Birds

I attended a black tie fundraiser for Canuck Place Children’s Hospice last night and I left the event thinking about games designed for play on social networks like Facebook.

As one of the guests at my table was a Facebook game designer, this might not come as a complete surprise. But as someone that didn’t know Facebook even had games, maybe just a little.

I was particularly interested because he told me women of a certain age are one of the key targets for game designers – and that certain age isn’t all that far from my own.

As I had recently been spending (aka wasting) a lot of time playing an online game called Angry Birds, I found his discussion about the psychology behind games design interesting.

If you haven’t played Angry Birds, let me describe it for you. At each level – and there are many – the player is provided with three or four birds that rest in a sling shot, all of which have some unique attribute, like blowing up when it lands, dropping an explosive egg, dividing into three, having the properties of a boomerang or moving at hyper speed. The goal is to lob your birds and decimate the opponent – something that resembles a hybrid between a pig and a frog – or maybe it’s just a green pig. The pig-like creatures are protected by all kinds of structures and sometimes even wear metal helmets, making them exceedingly difficult to destroy. If you are unsuccessful and there are any green pigs remaining after all of your birds are lobbed, you lose – and feel compelled to try again – or at least that’s been my experience. There is strategy involved in the game and a degree of dumb luck, but each time I play it, I feel like I’ve learned something – even if it has no applicability in the real world.

According to my dinner guest, the game is constructed around my innate need for completion – that is completing the task, successfully. Bear witness to the evening I spent almost 90 minutes determined to complete the level before I retired for the evening. The goal was clear, and my brain didn’t recognize the activity as playing a meaningless game. My brain, and the games designers know this only too well, gives the same kind of reward for solving Angry Birds as it does for learning an activity that could save my life. Dopamine is dopamine and my brain can’t tell the difference.

I now understand that women are a key audience for online games because we are more willing to pay small amounts of money to play them. While the Facebook games are free initially, there are small chachkas to purchase to enhance games play and women are more likely to make these purchases.

I don’t think twice about paying for an app that costs a dollar, or in the case of Angry Birds $4.99. But men, – and this won’t come as a surprise to anyone who lives with one – think they know everything and are a lot less likely to pay for an app, regardless of its price. Or so says the Facebook games designer so don’t shoot the writer.

But I think he may be right, because years ago, academic turned popular author Deborah Tannen published a philosophical treatise on how men and women communicate differently. Her position was that women are more equal in their communications styles, while men are more hierarchical. In the case of asking for directions, for example, a man feels that asking another man for directions puts him in a subservient position to the other male. Since they feel they should know how to get somewhere, they won’t ask because not knowing makes them look dumb. Women, on the other hand, just see asking for directions as a way to get to where they want to go.

Perhaps even more interesting than the psychology of games design is where the industry is going.

My guest shared that a game like Angry Birds cost about $500,000 to produce and has the world as its market. Compare this to the $15 million a company such as Electronic Arts spends to produce a game like Madden – the second most popular selling game ever – and you can quickly discern where the industry will be going. And it seems, older women will be along for the ride.