Originally published in East & West Magazine
A few weeks ago I was playing Angry Birds on my iPad in the back of a car somewhere between Sihanoukville and Phnom Penh. I’ve spent a lot of time in cars and buses lately and idle time on the road often means throwing down with bucktoothed pigs in iron helmets.
For anyone who has never played or seen Angry Birds, it’s a very simple game. You are given a few cartoon birds which you shoot from a slingshot at little green cartoon pigs hiding in structures resembling flimsy wooden forts. There are several types of birds with different powers that make each of them uniquely effective against different types of structures. You earn points for each pig killed and structure destroyed, and the number of points determines your rating for the level, from one to three stars. After playing a while you eventually burn through all of the levels. With all of the levels beaten the only thing left to do is go back and re-beat them as efficiently as possible, earning enough points on each level to receive a three-star rating. It’s all very official.
So you learn exactly what bird to use, how and in what order. If your first bird doesn’t fly right, then you probably know you’re not going to make your three-star quota. Fortunately the game has a reset button that lets you start over, so you don’t have to waste time playing a doomed round, which means you spend more time working on getting it just right.
On this particular day, as I was resetting again after yet another bird plinked impotently into a stone slab, I had a flashback. It was the early Eighties and I was on a field trip with my sixth grade class to the Atari offices in San Jose, California. It was kid Nirvana. Room after room crammed full of every video game known to child at the time. The latest and greatest of everything of the day. This was literally the pinnacle of human video gaming achievement, and they were all free and all ours for three glorious hours. That was a great day.
This won’t mean much to someone who grew up on PS3 and Wii, but in the Eighties playing videos games had real-life consequences. Video games used to cost money. Depending on the game, a quarter bought about three lives, and even if you were pretty good at the game that got you only about five minutes of total playing time. That was it. You either put another quarter in the slot or you went home. Needless to say, a kid on a small allowance took those three lives very, very seriously. If your best friend so much as bumped your elbow he’d be wearing his Slurpee.
Tourist: “Can you please tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?”
New Yorker: “Practice.”
In kid terms, getting really good at a video game used to require significant financial resources, so only the kids with lots of quarters to burn were able to achieve Pac-Man greatness. Today, as in so much around us, technology has made video games smaller, more powerful, more realistic (or fantastically unrealistic) and, most importantly, cheap. Now we no longer go to arcades to play because we have the best technology available right at home. And since we own the equipment and the game, all future play is basically free. So if your guy gets blown up it’s no big deal; there are an infinite number of soldiers ready to take his place without pay on the front line. Technology has removed the financial risk of failure. Or, to phrase it better, it has removed the risk associated with trying new ways to achieve a desired goal.
It used to be expensive to get a message out to the public too. You used to have to pay a lot of money to a TV station or a publisher so that they would send your message out to the people who they broadcast to, so only those with lots of money could afford to do it. And those who could afford it had to plan meticulously to make sure they hit their mark exactly. Media was far too expensive to attempt innovation or experimentation. As a result the media landscape was populated by the few and the risk-averse.
Digital and social media have leveled the playing field to the point where everyone with a computer and an internet connection has access to the same tools, so there is no longer any barrier to entry for the little guy. A small business owner now has the same media creation and distribution tools available to him as even the biggest corporations. Not only does this put him on the same playing field with the big boys, but now media is so inexpensive to produce and distribute that he can afford to try new ideas and innovate. Now he can afford to make mistakes, because now mistakes are free. If a plan doesn’t work the way you had hoped, then take what you’ve learned from the previous attempt, make a new plan and try again.
Terry Hoitz: "Where'd you learn to drive like that?!"
Allen Gamble: "Grand Theft Auto!"
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