The games of happiness
Jane McGonigal this morning talked about carrying over games into real life and her belief that the emerging force in technology is happiness. She predicts that by 2012 - an unfortunate date to pick for Londoners, since we all expect to spend much of that year absolutely miserable with traffic, lack of parking, security, surveillance, and hordes of tourists - whether a technology contributes to human happiness will be the key to its eventual success. I can’t think of a government service that’s ever been specified this way (least of all the Olympics).
She lsited a number of books that bolster her prediction:
Dale Gilbert: Stumbling on Happiness (peopel are really bad at telling what makes us happy)
The Science of Happiness (Klein)
Happiness: Lessons from a New Sciencie
Authentic Happiness (Seligman)
The Paradox of Choice (the only one I’m familiar with - basic thesis that increasing choice increases confusion)
The Economist 12/06 “Happiness and How to Measure It”
BBC The Happiness Formula
Time cover story Jan 2005.
She lists three key factors of happiness: pleasure; engagement; meaning.
She then went on to describe some of the real-life games she’s spawned. For example: the Ministry of Reshelving. An attempt to apply folksonomy to real life cataloguing by deploying hundreds of people across the US with downloaded and printed tags to reshelve copies of Orwell’s 1984 into history, politics, military history — and out of fiction. (This may have increased the happiness of the game players, but it will have done nothing for that of the book store staff who had to put the books back or of anyone trying to find and buy a copy that day.) Random acts of kindness - invade a formerly public space that has been taken over by private interests (an increasing issue in the US) and be kind to targets in your general vicinity. Shake hands! Kiss them! Etc. A puzzla-solving hunt involving answering ringing pay phones and hearing seconds of a War of the Worlds type drama and then reporting on same online.
We live life forwards, but we measure happiness looking backwards. Does, McGonigal asks, our technology pass the deathbed test? She believes that in the common years we will be beuilding technolgoy around quality of life. IN a sense, this is what IdealGovernment/Blindside are attempting to do. But I don’t think happiness is always going to be the right measure. And in fact, the right might argue that if you make people *happy* by giving them welfare, you’ve done them a disservice.
Her slides will be up here on Friday.
wg
March 29th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
For the Ideal gov intro to Happiness: lessons from a new science by Richard Layard of LSE see http://www.idealgovernment.com/index.php/blog/comments/happiness_and_the_role_of_government/
Here’s why the way we reform public services is wrong: http://www.idealgovernment.com/index.php/blog/comments/public_service_reform_pulls_the_wrong_levers_says_layard/
As a non-technologist rooted in Christianity I find Kevin Kelly’s argument beguiling: that technology is self-evidently part of the unfolding of the divine will and that wwe have a moral duty to use it to the best of our ability. That’s what I tell the missus when I’, still blogging and supper’s on the table, anyway.
April 2nd, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Look on the bright side - the world is supposed to end in 2012, having missed all the other dates for the past 2000 years. Lucky escape from the Olympic hype if the doom mongers are right this time. Coincidentally, that is also the approximate date when supercomputers reach Human level processing capacity.