Angry Birds

This paper proposes a TNT-generation system in Science Birds, an Angry Birds clone, which is aimed to help spectators maintain healthy emotion. Interestingness-rating data on TNT explosions are collected from a number of participants. A regressor is then built from the collected data whose input consists of a set of features representing effects due to an explosion and output indicates the average interestingness. A user study is then conducted where participants are asked to answer a questionnaire measuring their positive and negative affect after watching each of the three gameplay videos – the explosions with the highest average interestingness, the explosions with the lowest average interestingness, the explosions with the highest interestingness predicted by the regressor – in counterbalanced order. Our results show that the first gameplay video statistically significantly increases the positive affect of the participants and that both first and third videos statistically significantly decrease the negative affect.

Este trabalho buscou analisar mobile games que são disponibilizados para telefones celulares, smartphones e tablets, de forma que fosse possível inventariar suas qualidades e sugerir formas de adaptá-los para o uso em sala de aula. Para o estudo, foram analisados os jogos Angry Birds e Puzzle Quest, visto que eles são famosos em seus contextos e muito conhecidos do público. Conclui-se que o uso de mobile games em sala de aula é estimulante e que não existe a necessidade de criação específica para cada conteúdo.

The hugely successful franchise Angry Birds by Finnish company Rovio is synonymous with the new and growing market of app-based games played on smartphones and tablets. These are often referred to as ‘casual games’, highlighting their design which rewards short bursts of play, usually on mobile media devices, rather than the sustained attention and dedicated hardware required for larger PC or console games. Significantly, there is enormous competition within the mobile games, while the usually very low cost (free, or just one or two dollars) makes a huge ranges of choices available to the average consumer. Moreover, these choices are usually framed by just one standardised interface, such as the Google Play store for Android powered devices, or the Apple App store for iOS devices. Within this plethora of options, I will argue that in addition to being well designed and enjoyable to play, successful mobile games are consciously situated within a social network market.

The concepts of ‘social network markets’ reframes the creative industries not so much as the generators of intellectual property outputs, but as complex markets in which the circulation and value of media is as much about taste, recommendations and other networked social affordances (Potts, Cunningham, Hartley, & Ormerod, 2008). For mobile games, one of the most effective methods of reaching potential players, then, is through the social attentions and activity of other players. Rovio have very deliberate in the wide-spread engagement with players across a range of social media platforms, promoting competitive play via Twitter and Facebook, highlighting user engagement such as showcasing Angry Birds themed cakes, and generally promoting fan engagement on many levels, encouraging the ‘spreadability’ of Angry Birds amongst social networks (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013). In line with recognising the importance of engagement with the franchise, Rovio have also taken a very positive approach of unauthorised merchandising and knock-offs, especially in China and South-East Asia. In line with Montgomery and Potts’ (2008) argument that a weaker intellectual property approach will foster a more innovative creative industries in China, rather than attempting to litigate of lock down unauthorised material, Rovio have stated they see this as building awareness of Angry Birds and are working to harness this new, socially-driven market (Dredge, 2012). As Rovio now license everything from Angry Birds plush toys to theme parks, social network markets can be perpetuated even by unauthorised material, which builds awareness and interest in the official games and merchandising in the long run. Far from a standalone example, this paper argues that not only is Rovio consciously situating Angry Birds within a social network market model, but that such a model can drive other mobile games success in the future.

Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen coined the term ‘supernormal stimulus’ after discovering that birds who lay small, pale blue eggs speckled with grey prefer to sit on larger, bright blue eggs with black polka-dots. He found that he could exaggerate the key qualities of any natural stimulus to produce a stronger reaction yet--be it nurturance, courtship, fear or aggression.
    Animals encounter supernormal stimuli mostly when experimenters build them.  Humans can generate their own and media are awash with them: friendly smiling faces more consistently welcoming than ones own friends, animated cartoon characters with wider eyes than any real child’s, seductive bodies exceeding any proportions found in nature, and a huge array of supernatural menaces.
    This chapter examines film, television, spectator sports, video games, and social websites as well as more traditional media such as print and musical performance in terms of the concept of supernormal stimuli.

In this paper, we design an audience participation Angry Birds platform and evaluate its effectiveness in promoting social well-being. Existing work reported that playing online games together with other players has positive effects on the promotion of communication and improvement of social relations. With the advent of audience participation games, research on methods for cooperative operations is gaining attention. However, in games targeted in existing research, game rules are complicated, so audiences need time to learn how to play them. Therefore, we focus on the Angry Birds game with simple rules and propose a mechanism to let audiences control bird shots via chat. In addition, the maps, levels, or stages of those games in the existing studies are fixed, so such games may become boring and make the audience give up playing. Therefore, we also propose a mechanism to let audiences generate original game levels via chat, which is expected to increase fun. Our results confirm the effectiveness of both proposed mechanisms.

This paper presents our work to enhance a state-ofthe-art level generator (Sketch-to-Level Generator) that generates levels for an Angry-Birds-like game from drawn sketches. To achieve this task, Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (Cycle- GAN) are used. CycleGAN is trained using two datasets: sketch drawings and typical level-structures. The former are taken from Google’s Quick, Draw! datasets, and the latter from the winning level generator at the 2017 and 2018 AIBIRDS level generation competitions. The output of the trained CycleGAN is used as the input of Sketch-to-Level Generator. Our results show that the proposed preprocessing technique using CycleGAN allows Sketch-to-Level Generator to more successfully generate levels from arbitrary sketch drawings.

Aggressive behavioural interactions between animals are widespread in nature, with ecological and evolutionary consequences of such interactions reported for both individuals giving and receiving aggression. Yet despite the importance of aggressive interactions in determining social dominance and conferring fitness benefits to successful individuals, we lack a general understanding of the conditions that influence the variation in agonistic behaviours among individuals and species. We conducted a global meta-analysis of published time-activity budgets, using a data set comprising 555 values from 88 studies, to determine variation in the time that waterbirds engaged in aggressive interactions. The mean ± SD percentage of time devoted to aggression was 2.0 ± 3.6%, with a range of 0.0-35.0%. We used our data set to test four predictions regarding avian aggression, based on the findings of earlier site-based studies. We predicted that the time spent on aggression would be influenced by four factors: (1) age class, (2) sex, (3) seasonal timing and (4) functional feeding group. A comparison of linear mixed-effects models using an information theoretic approach indicated that the proportion of time waterbirds spent engaged in aggressive interactions was best explained by the age class and sex of the focal waterbird species. More time was spent on aggression by males than females, and by adults than juveniles. We found no evidence that the time spent on aggressive behaviours varied across latitudes or body mass, with seasonal timing, sexual dimorphism, migration or breeding strategies, or between different functional feeding groups. Our findings highlight the high levels of variation in the time devoted to aggression across species, feeding groups, latitudes and seasons. Furthermore, our study demonstrates the utility of the numerous published time-activity budget studies that are available as a valuable source of data that can be used to answer broad-scale questions regarding animal behaviour.

In this paper, we propose TNT Gained In optical Flows (TGIF), a new algorithm to select the most entertaining TNT explosions in an Angry Birds-like action puzzle game. We assume that spectators like a high amount of object movement distributed equally over both space and time and that such movement entertains spectators. We, hence, first divide a game video into multiple frames and estimate the optical flows of each frame. With these optical flows, we compute a total displacement and two kinds of Shannon entropy: spatial entropy and temporal entropy. Spatial TGIF and Temporal TGIF are computed by multiplying the total displacement and the respective entropy. We then predict the best explosion video using these two methods. Our results show that the proposed Spatial TGIF's correct rate is the highest , i.e., 95% which is much higher than 65% by our previous work.

This paper investigates whether and to which degree watching Angry Birds-like live streaming could affect the spectator’s working memory (WM). We prepared Angry Birds-like gameplay on the Twitch streaming platform in which a domino effect based on Rube Goldberg Machine (RGM) mechanism is featured in each generated game level. The spectators’ working memory are measured using the N-back task, and our results show a possibility that watching the proposed live streaming can increase the WM performance.

Este trabalho defende que a expansão dos Angry Birds do segmento adulto para o infantil não se limita a uma estratégia mercadológica, mas se ampara em processos socioculturais que possibilitam cada vez mais a desvinculação entre o consumo e a materialidade da idade. Tal hipótese se ancora nas contribuições dos estudos da infância, que privilegiam o paradigma da competência como lente teórica para os fenômenos da infância. A análise da primeira temporada de Angry Birds Toons mostrou elementos da série que dialogam com as novas concepções de infância, revelando que importa cada vez menos o que a criança sabe e cada vez mais os usos que ela faz dos significados a sua volta, ou seja, sua ação no mundo.

Launched by Finnish game developers Rovio in December 2009, Angry Birds is the most popular smartphone application or app to date, with over 140 million downloads worldwide, including both paid and advertising-supported free versions on a range devices. Taking advantage of the low-cost digital distribution platforms for mobile devices such as Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Marketplace, Angry Birds costs, if anything, only a tiny fraction of the price of a PC or console game. The time commitment required to play the game is much smaller, too, with Angry Birds to some extent a harbinger of a raft of casual games which aim to be easy to understand, easy to play, encourage repeated use and have high levels of feedback and reward. Equally important, Angry Birds and other mobile media are increasingly ubiquitous not just because of their widespread use, but because that use can occur anywhere. Those wasted moments at bus stops, in waiting rooms, on the subway or while half-watching a television show can now be spent catapulting enraged birds toward the smug egg-stealing pigs and the various bizarre structures in which they hide. Given the popularity of Angry Birds, it’s hardly a surprise that a huge array of different remixes have emerged featuring the characters, story and music from the game.

In this paper, we design an audience participation Angry Birds platform and evaluate its effectiveness in promoting social well-being. Existing work reported that playing online games together with other players has positive effects on the promotion of communication and improvement of social relations. With the advent of audience participation games, research on methods for cooperative operations is gaining attention. However, in games targeted in existing research, game rules are complicated, so audiences need time to learn how to play them. Therefore, we focus on the Angry Birds game with simple rules and propose a mechanism to let audiences control bird shots via chat. In addition, the maps, levels, or stages of those games in the existing audienceparticipation-game studies are fixed, so such games may become boring and make the audience give up playing. Therefore, we also propose another mechanism to let audiences generate original game levels via chat, which is expected to incr...

This workshop presentation was one of a series of presentations that addresses how to implement digital game-based learning method in various disciplines. The workshop was held at the Metro State University of Denver Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology.