One of the go-to anecdotes Simple Machine founders Kurt Bieg and Ramsey Nasser have about their iPhone golf-meets-Twitter game Twirdie involves a five-year-old picking up the game for the first time. According the the duo—classmates from the Parsons School of Design who found sudden success recently with the release of their rhythm game, Circadia—the first time the junior gamer in question picked up the game, he sat with it for over two hours, typing away terms into the game's interface, using trending words on Twitter to putt the ball back and forth across the green to get it into the hole.
For Nasser and Bieg, this story, which they told me during a brief GDC 2012 interview and recounted again during the Experimental Gameplay Session, neatly sums up the appeal of the game which challenges users to flex their social awareness, regardless of their age, background, or nationality. Twirdie and Circadia represent two very different yet equally egalitarian-minded games from the studio that seem as much about getting people to try something unexpected as they are about climbing the sales charts.
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