Engineering happiness

Interactive designers are in the happiness business, designing services and experiences which improve people’s lives.

Today’s keynote is from ARG queen Jane McGonigal. Despite her worry there would be less excitement than previous day’s sessions, she delivered a great talk on how ARGs are helping to define a new type of happiness.

Presenting happiness as the new social capital, she described a near future where wellbeing may be the metric against which we measure all design.

Satisfying work, the experience of being good at something, being part of something and collaborating with people we like, makes people happy. Multi-player games then, are the ultimate happiness creating engines. They are community based, collaborative, come with a clear mission and feedback mechanisms which can make them more rewarding than real life.

How then do we take some of the involved, interactive and collaborative elements of gaming and use them to make real life better?

Signals people are already doing it:

• Chore wars - kids earning game points when they do chores.
• Seriosity - You want me to read that report/attend that meeting? It will cost you: virtual currency for the workplace.
• Citizen logistics - a located game-like way of working, volunteering, finding assistance and having a good time which gives points for making other people’s dreams come true.

Talking through her new research exploring the characteristics of ARGs, she ended with three main points:

• We are all in the happiness business, we might just not be fully aware of it yet.
• Game designers have a head start because they are used to optimizing experiences.
• ARGs are important because they signal a desire in all of us to redesign reality for a better quality of life.