Games

In November of 2011, Finnish video game developer Rovio announced that their game Angry Birds had been downloaded more than half a billion times.1 To mark the occasion, the company released some statistics about the gameplay, which involves using a slingshot to launch wingless birds at pigs positioned inside increasingly complex constructions. One of the more astonishing facts was the number of birds that had been launched by players of the game since its release two years earlier reached 400 billion. In March of 2013, the number of downloads of Angry Birds (in all its different versions, including a Star Wars themed edition) stood at 1.7 billion,2 so we can safely assume that the number of birds launched has tripled by now. These incredible numbers show how pervasive video games have become. In just a few decades they have evolved from an activity for reticent teenage boys to something that virtually everyone who owns a smartphone or tablet computer is exposed to. In fact, adult women now represent a bigger percentage of the gaming population than boys seventeen years old and younger.3 How did we get to this point? And perhaps more interestingly, is it somehow possible to put that commitment to catapulting cartoon birds to use in an organizational context?