From a reader:
I would first like to say that I dearly love your blog, but I must beg you to tone down the number of Angry Birds posts. As someone with extensive gaming experience, having spent six years of my life averaging around 3-4 hours of World of Warcraft a day and now spending my time playing at least 15-20 games of Starcraft 2 every day, I cannot take it much more.
Ever since Angry Birds came out, older people with smart phones have all of a sudden noticed the existence of video games and have taken to writing pages upon pages about this terribly one dimensional game that does no justice to any of the incredibly intricate and well crafted games out there that are played by millions of people for hours every day – sometimes professionally.
It isn't even that I don't like Angry Birds; in fact, I had gone through and beaten the game's PC predecessor, Crush the Castle, well before the iPhone version first emerged. There is nothing wrong with flash games, or simple games like hearts and solitaire, but that doesn't mean that just because millions of adults finally got their video game cherry popped upon receiving a smart phone I can stand by and say nothing while you act like the little kid who just discovered sugar.
It seems reasonable to assume that more people have played Tetris during the course of their lifetimes, yet you don't see article after article gushing about how ingenious it is. All I am saying is that if I have to read another paragraph telling me how "it mixes an unexpected conceit with a pleasing aesthetic world and complicates simple goals with the friction force of straightforward physical laws." I am not sure how I will react. Please stop trying to rationalize the fact that you are finally addicted to a video game and admit it, you might even gain a new sense of perspective on what tens of millions of Americans do on a daily basis.
The Dish 