Angry Birds

I was introduced to Angry Birds last Christmas when I found my friend Adam playing the game on his android.  Last week, I rediscovered it on facebook! But today, discussing how one needs to approach policy influence with colleagues at the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA), I used angry birds as an analogy.  

First, let me explain the phenomenon.   Angry Birds is a physics-based puzzle game in which you must launch a series of birds at structures in order to dispatch the evil green pigs hiding within.  The swine have stolen the birds' eggs and it's up to you to get them back.  The game is highly addictive, and you strive for the highest score and the most efficient way  of completing  each level.  There are different birds to use, each with its own speciality and each with its own limitations.

Assume the green pigs are not evil, but just those who CEPA is targeting for policy influence.  There are different structures that surround them, and it's up to CEPA to use different tactics (in the game, different birds) to breakdown these structures and reach our target. The skill is in being able to direct the bird at key elements of the structure.   Or, to use the analogy differently, CEPA can consider itself one of the birds, but as one of the birds, it will only have a set of capabilities - to break glass (if it's a tiny bird) to destroy wood (if it is slightly bigger) or to blow everything up (if it's large and black and resembling a bomb!).  How does it leverage its capacity?

 HEALTH WARNING: it is recommended that readers take my word for it, rather than try it out for themselves as the addictive properties of the game can cause high levels of procrastination.


Comments

  1. Russ23 April 2012 at 20:09

    1) The Anders Breivik example should have put an end to all these games of destruction - no matter how innocuous they appear!
    2) Pigs do not ordinarily covet eggs (as lizards do - for example). They are therefore selfish (if not evil). And their selfishness stems from self-interest and a lack of empathy for the less fortunate. Since it is they who make policy one needs to get rid of them - either through the ballot box (if the system is transparent), or with the use of the 'black bird' (when not).
    4) Notice how all things destructive are BLACK. It is the subtle brainwashing that has been taking place throughout history - and why those in the non-industrial world (aka 'developing') have had a 'Jesus complex'.
    5) Do not procastinate interacting with those around you - unleash the Black Bird on your computer!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Will change come through red gates?

Image
My former schoolmates are pre-ordering their copy of a coffee-table book entitled Through the Red Gates, a celebratory volume of 125 years of Ladies College, the school we attended on Flower Road, which celebrates this landmark event in 2025.   Some former schoolmates (and others) are also agonising at the possibility that the gates to the country’s governance might turn red with a Malimawa/NPP/Anura Kumara Dissanayake victory in the Presidential election next week.   The fear of a NPP/AKD victory takes several forms: it evokes the spectre of violence of the JVP (the main party in the NPP) forgetting that JVP are not the only perpetrators of terror. The political space, since 1 971 at least, has been seeped in violence - the JVP of the 1980s was particularly vicious, but s uccessive state regimes have unleashed state violence and given head to extra-judicial violent e lements that were equally virulent.   As Lionel Bopage has said in a recent interview , the violenc...
Read more

Some thoughts on the White Saviour Complex of development consultancies

Image
photo taken from  https://e11e99.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/identity-in-a-post-colonial-world/ I am sharing some thoughts that I picked  randomly from a relatively progressive Christian facebook page (Sojourners)that I follow, mainly to help me counter the rather misinformed opinions of my true believer Christian friends (brown not white).  The article is called , 6 HARMFUL CONSEQUENCES OF THE WHITE SAVIOR COMPLEX, BY RYAN KUJA  and is so relevant to the northern development consultancy space that many of my (white) friends and colleagues occupy (and that I too sometimes venture into) that I thought to use it to write a blog post that I can share with that community.   R yan Kuja confesses that he was "never a missionary in the standard sense of the word, never proselytized or attempted to save souls"  but admits that "the engine driving [him] was the white saviour complex..... The other Westerners [he] worked with believed [they] had it al...
Read more

Year 2014: Buddhist era 2557-2558

Image
There was an interesting debate among colleagues that was triggered by the simple fact that I shared the official government calendar for 2014.  The Calendar has, as it has had in the previous year, and possibly many years prior to that,  the sub title -  Buddhist Era 2557-2558. This triggered a discussion on whether it was appropriate to have that on the calendar or not.  The argument against seemed to be based on it being seen as an imposition by the State of Buddhism, into areas that are perceived as secular and non-religious. [Though of course, as was pointed out,  the Gregorian Calendar is not really secular at all, based on the fact that it counts the years from the birth of Christ!] What was interesting was that we were having this debate at all.  Obviously, the current context has made us all ultra sensitive to certain issues, and the whole question of a state religion led some of us to be uncomfortable, others to be resentful (not overtly ma...
Read more