4. Collective Intelligence

Transmedia storytelling is a fundamental part of the Angry Birds series, providing an era of collective intelligence. According to Pierre Levy (1999), the term collective intelligence refers to the way in which social structures enable the production and circulation of knowledge within an interconnected society. For various games, both on consoles and within the app market, websites have social media pages dedicated to promote or share information about the game itself.  This is particularly important when trying to promote a new feature or installment of a part of the series. This has been executed particularly well by Angry Birds this year with the promo of the ‘Angry Birds Movie’. There has been interactive bus stop posters with QR scanners, mobile advertisements, Facebook banner adverts and even a new Snapchat filter enabling users to pretend that they are the red bird. This allows audiences to circulate knowledge in a rapid manner as social media websites are simultaneous and constantly updating to the newest trends.

Back when the game was first released, the fundamental rating on the listings, in the iOS app market, had Angry Birds as the lead sale, leading to more hype and talk across different social media pages like Twitter and YouTube, where audiences began to post content about the game which can be viewed and interpreted by other audiences. Stuart Hall (1980) describes three states of audience consumption, from dominant, oppositional and negotiated readings of texts. Being a game, it is difficult to gage the extent to which audiences may agree with or oppose the messages within a children’s game. In other instances, such as Call of Duty, these ideological messages may be portrayed more clearly such as western superiority which can make a more definitive response from audiences. However Angry Birds uses a fictional world with cartoon characters, perhaps some can stretch as far as using political motives for the characterisation of the birds and pigs, which could in turn create a dominant reading for some audiences.