Angry Birds, Apple’s best-selling iPhone app with over 50 million downloads, gets physical.  Mattel has purchased the rights to convert the video game into a physical board game, demonstrating the increasing blurriness between Internet culture and American culture writ large.

This event offers an opportunity to further elaborate the meaning of the term “augmented reality.”  On this blog we have regularly defined augmented reality as blurring/collapse/implosion of the material and the digital worlds.  Mattel’s licensing of Angry Birds for a board game raises and interesting question, because it does not so much represent a collapse in the distinction between digital and physical; instead, it is more a case of copying or mimicking the digital in the realm of the physical.  This can hardly be said to be different than Second Life simulating (well, at least, almost simulating) the laws of physics that exist in first life.

Because the Angry Birds board game is entirely separate from its online incarnation, it serves more to reinforce the illusory dichotomy between the digital and the material more than it serves to dispel it – quite the opposite of augmented reality.  Mattel has missed an opportunity here to make a truly 21st Century augmented reality by linking the board game to the app; instead, all they have produced is very old game masquerading as something novel.