How I kicked my addiction to the iPhone game Angry Birds

Angry Bird is addictive. It's dangerous fun.

A post from Psycology today by Michael Chorost, Ph.D. has the whole story. Here is a part:

After weeks of struggle, I've finally deleted Angry Birds from my iPhone. It is a fiendishly addictive game. The premise is simple: you "pull" back on a slingshot to fire a scowling bird at a structure with green pigs in it. The better your aim, the more damage you do and the more green pigs you kill.
I've played a number of iPhone games, but this one was a masterpiece of addictiveness. Here's why.
1. It's simple. Absurdly simple. You pull back on a slingshot and fire. Sometimes you tap on the screen to make a bird in flight do something, like drop a bomb. And that's it. There's no learning curve. You're playing in ten seconds.
 2. It's rewarding. When the bird hits the structure, things break. Glass tinkles. Wood splinters. Stone shatters. Pigs explode. It brought out the ten-year old boy in me. The same ten-year old boy who built random structures out of Legos and threw them up at the ceiling to see them explode all over the place. It gives the player the primitive pleasure of blowing shit up.
 3. It's realistic. The game's physics engine makes it look eerily real. Gravity works just as you would expect. Pieces of broken stone and glass fly in long arcs to the ground. Debris absorbs bird impacts. Towers topple to the ground and fly apart.
 4. It's funny. The insane gabbling of the birds is a hoot. While waiting in line for their turn on the slingshot they hop up and down and do backflips in their fury. To me it was even funnier that their rage seemed entirely purposeless, like Iago's in Othello. I was disappointed when I later found there was a backstory: the pigs had stolen their eggs. I thought it was much better that the birds just mindlessly wanted to kill.
So the game's simple, realistic, rewarding, and funny. But it's also a terrific manpulator of the brain's dopamine system.
Here's why. While I was writing WORLD WIDE MIND I interviewed Steven Grant, chief of the clinical neuroscience department at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland. Grant told me that dopamine's mechanism kicks in when something happens that is typically followed by a reward. Like firing an Angry Bird at a green pig.
In other words, dopamine's presence signals the brain that there is a reward coming, like glass-and-wood houses deliciously flying apart. But the brain doesn't know how good the reward will be. Will the bird just glance off the top, or will it score a glorious direct hit? That uncertainty creates a tension, and the brain craves release. It makes you want to do whatever it is creates the release. Eat the food, drink the beer, pull the slingshot.