ON THE LITE SIDE - Angry Birds, Addictive Gaming

"Sleep Can Wait. The Birds Are Angry." by RICK MARIN, New York Times 4/28/2011

YOU didn’t play Donkey Kong with your dad.

Mine wouldn’t have known what it was. And even if he did, it would have felt like a transgression of the respect/dignity boundary that used to separate men from boys.

The iPad has changed all that. It’s the ultimate generational equalizer. Take Angry Birds. The game phenomenon from the Finnish company Rovio, with 40 million active users, 75 million paid and ad-supported downloads and 2 million plush dolls sold, has become among the man-boys in our house a furious competition for power, points and digital “Achievement,” a word that flashes rewardingly on the Angry Birds screen.

The game’s principles are simple: you slingshot red, yellow or whatever birds at smug green pigs who in the game’s narrative have stolen the birds’ eggs. Hence their anger. The goal is to kill the pigs and destroy as much of their protective housing as possible with as few birds as possible.

The birds chirp and squawk. The pigs grunt and snicker as the game’s Tchaikovsky-lite musical stings insinuate their way into your brain.

Like everyone else, I was sucked in by the easy early levels, challenged by the later, trickier ones, then driven mad by Level “It’s 2 a.m. and I’m Wasting My Life.”

My wife now falls asleep to the sound of glass breaking, TNT exploding and digital farm animals meeting their violent demise, mystified by the simpleton she now finds herself married to.

And mother to. Because our two boys have joined their role model into this mind-numbing insanity.

“What level are you on?” became shorthand around the apartment. Diego, my older boy, soon eclipsed me with his 6-year-old reflexes. Meaning I had to stay up till all hours to catch up. And if I surpassed him, he freaked out.

“Don’t play Angry Birds,” he’d admonish me before going to bed.

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” I’d say, in reassuring tones.

Then, of course, I did.

So now Angry Birds was making me lie to my own children. Pitting father against son, as we tried to yank the iPad out of one another’s hands. It’s like the world’s cheapest crack.

I found my older spawn under the covers of his Ikea bunk bed with my iPad, sneaking in late-night Angry-Birding of his own.

His younger brother, Kingsley, fights bitterly for Angry Bird time, too, then plays the game in a completely noncompetitive way. He just likes shooting the birds.

When I wasn’t around, the little addicts talked their clueless mom into blurting out my iTunes password, allowing them to buy the Mighty Eagle, a giant bird that, when activated, wipes out all the pigs.

The Eagle is a cheat. I refuse to use it on principle. Just like I wouldn’t watch the YouTube or Bing hints.

My friend Chris fell into that. Because he has girls. With no one to compete against at home, he had to make the game his enemy. It wasn’t enough to clear every level; he craved the Golden Eggs.

At one point, the sound went out on the game, a glitch that the diabolical Finns at Rovio claim to be working on. I immediately lost interest in playing. Turned out I was playing for the sound effects. Then, “for the children,” I went online and found out how to get the sound back. And sure enough, the monkey (or the Mighty Eagle) was on my back again.

There’s no Cold Turkey in the Angry Birds aviary. Addicts are on their own. My friend Jonathan forced himself to remove the game from his iPad. Like my college roommate who could stop watching TV only if he stuck it in his closet.

I’ve never had that kind of addictive personality. Which is why it mystifies me now, being trapped in these fugue states of pig-killing — porcicide. I get the attraction for the boys. What’s in it for me? Blowing stuff up? Mastering “levels”? Just having a mindless activity to shut down my brain at the end of the day?

Then I realized this is what my father did in the Spanish Civil War. When he joined the Republican army against Franco’s fascists, they assigned him to the artillery because he could calculate the trigonometric arc to fire a shell into the air and have it hit a target several hundred meters away. Which is exactly the skill required to slingshot those vengeance-bent birds at those fat (dare I say fascist?) pigs.

So I could claim it’s in my genes. But that doesn’t quite explain the death match I’m locked in with my boys over a 99-cent game. I’m talking about physically yanking the iPad out of their hands.

When Diego was ordering me not to sneak in any Angry Birds after bedtime, I asked why he cared if I got ahead of him. “I’m proud of you when you do something I can’t,” I told him.

“Yeah,” he had to explain to his slow-witted old man. “But I’m not proud when you do it.”

That this elemental Oedipal dramedy had to be explained to me by someone four feet tall is proof that not only is he better at Angry Birds than I — he may be smarter. And for that I bought him the $11.95 yellow-bird plush toy. And for his brother, the “bomb.”

My father died 15 years ago. He never knew his grandsons. But as I watch them execute their own trigonometric calculations to skillfully, passionately combat their foes, that word lights up on my screen, too.

Achievement.