I’m willing to bet that you’ve heard of Angry Birds. You’ve probably played it, too. It’s an almost stupidly popular phenomenon — since releasing on iOS in Dec. 2009, it’s sold over 42 million copies, been ported to other platforms and spawned a multitude of spin-offs. According to developer Rovio, 40 million people play the game each month, and 3.33 million hours are spent playing Angry Birds every single day.

My dad told me a few months ago that he saw a businessman showing off Angry Birds to a group of his colleagues. When I visited my aunt over break, it was Angry Birds all the time. Even as I write this column from a dark corner of a psychology lecture, I can see a girl a few seats away flinging irate poultry on her iPod touch. It’s everywhere.

That brings me to what might be a more incredible accomplishment of Angry Birds — it’s become a legitimate staple of pop culture. In a world where literally dozens of games fly under the radar each and every week, Rovio’s little game has managed to stick. When I bring up Angry Birds, people know what I’m talking about. That’s more than I can say about most of the games that have been stealing my sleep over the past few years.

For such a giant, Angry Birds had humble beginnings. Before Finnish developer Rovio — formed in 2003 by three students at Helsinki University — developed their magnum opus, no one on this side of Atlantic (and most people on the other) had ever heard of them or their first obscure title, King of the Cabbage World. A few years later, and demand for Angry Birds was crashing websites when the game was ported to the Android platform.

It makes sense why Angry Birds blew up. It’s simple, it’s cute, you can play it in short bursts and it’s absurdly cheap — the essential formula for a good portable title. When it first came out, I was all on board. It was hard to beat for just 99 cents, and I loved that it was the brainchild of a few quirky Scandinavians. And of course, anything that expands the industry is good in my book.

But somewhere between embracing its unheralded, out-of-nowhere release and seeing it get a movie deal and game-of-the-year nominations, I’ve grown a little cold on Angry Birds (and that’s not just because they released a wintery holiday edition). I don’t want to take anything away from what Angry Birds has done — it’s a solid title that almost single-handedly established the iPhone as a viable, if not excellent, gaming platform. But even so, I can’t understand why it’s so explosively popular. It’s a simple, repetitive game with a single, simple mechanic. You can succeed with little more than trial and error, and there isn’t really any progression and meaningful variety as the game goes on.

Is that really enough for over 40 million people to be satisfied? I know it’s only a dollar, but something irks me when I see so many people forking over their money for such a limited experience. What gets under my skin more, though, is the all-too-likely notion that Angry Birds constitutes many of these people’s only experience with video games. If that’s the case, I’m a little worried that our cultural concept of “video games” is getting a bit diluted. Maybe it’s a little elitist, but I don’t want to see people 20 years from now — the same people who just made Angry Birds the best-selling game on PlayStation Network — waxing nostalgic about Angry Birds. I don’t want to believe that for kids today, Angry Birds is our parents’ Pac-Man or a college kid’s Super Mario Kart.

Angry Birds is no doubt a defining game of this generation, and with good reason. But its incredibly wide appeal gives many people a woefully incomplete picture of the eclectic, complicated and constantly changing world of games.

(By the way, my dad told those businessmen they were fooling themselves with Angry Birds and told them to try a little game called Peggle. I like to think I’ve trained him well.)