Paying attention to angry birds: Rearticulating hybrid worlds and embodied play through casual iPhone games

This chapter addresses a highly visible and important area of mobile media: videogames. The increased ubiquity of smartphones and their “app” ecologies—from Apple’s iPhone to Samsung’s Galaxy series—has led to a proliferation of videogames made specifically for mobile, touch screen devices that disrupt distinctions between the actual and virtual worlds of play. The rise in popularity of smartphone devices and mobile games has coincided with a rise in popularity of “casual” games amidst a much broader fracturing ecology of videogame play and production.