As far as angry birds, well... there are times when someone's character isn't present for what's going on, and if they're keeping busy while waiting for the action to return to them, well that's fine I suppose. As long as they're keeping it to themselves- not playing games with the music on, or interrupting others to show everyone 'funny cat picture ###' or worse still... 'funny cat video ###'!
I'm glad it works in your group.
In my experience, what happens is, the person who has zoned out (on angry birds or whatever) will later need to be brought up to speed on what happened while his character was 'elsewhere'. Maybe it's more to do with my particular play style. I don't hide events from players who aren't in the scene. It's a shared story, everyone gets to hear what is going on regardless of where they are.
...and yes. This means I don't do backstabbing games, nor do I play with people who can't deal with knowing stuff they can't act upon. If a player character wants to assassinate or 'do over' other player characters, I point them in the direction of WoW or Battlefield 3 or a nice game of MtG.
To be honest, I'm not even that keen on the idea of constantly referring to rules books at the table. With SpaceMaster I tend to have laminated charts for the combat stuff that can lay on the table with drinks and food on them. Play the game, worry about sorting out rules between sessions.
My whole group(s) use laptops while gaming at this point, and it's generally not a problem.
At this point our privateers party commands six ships (discounting fighters) and close to a hundred crew, so living solely off of dead trees was beginning to become unwieldy.
We store everything online for the most part, so that if someone misses a session we can still access all the particulars on their assets.
To be fair, this does sound like the kind of game that could make the most sensible use of computers to keep under control. Can't say I've ever wanted to run something quiet so ... large.
Sounds like fun though!
