Channel 4's newest game, SuperMe, which just released today, is a game about achieving happiness. Like many of their games it is a web-based interface that connects with various social media, such as facebook. The story of the game is how to hack life. More specifically, perhaps, it reiterates the point that Life is a Game. It's another project commissioned by Alice Taylor and it has the fingerprints of a veteran gamer all over it.
SuperMe begins with the above video, which describes different ways that people achieve happiness illustrated by opinions from experts to first-person accounts. The solutions range broadly from choosing the right relationships to meaningful work to exercise. About midway through the video, game elements begin to appear, signaling to the viewer an additional lexicon for how to achieve happiness: Wisdom (shown below with one of the speakers meditating on the London Tube), Ability, Influence and Connections.
One of the speakers in SuperMe says he achieves happiness by meditating on the London Tube.Players score and level up by doing things that can contribute to greater happiness. Scoring and linkages cycle through Facebook.
This is another provocative piece of work that indicates a trend that is finally coming to its own: Life is a game. If you play it like a game by choosing quests that are good for you, you level up in ways that are good to you.
[SuperMe]
Alice has a good write-up on her blog.
2 comments:
It's a neat concept on the surface, but it's a little depressing as well.
Maybe it's always been so and people never had the means in common to talk about it, but it's always weird to see it writ large that people need concepts as fundamental as happiness and excitement explicitly broken down in this manner, complete with experts saying things like "happy children outperform their peers."
Also, how is this construct better than, or even good enough to grab mindshare from, the organic social groups the target audience has already built? Digging into it, it feels like a way to guide people through a set of inspirational media - videos, games, etc. - but if these were compelling enough, wouldn't they propagate on their own without tacking on a points system?
That's a fascinating comment, Anonymous. I'd love to learn more about your thoughts on this.
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