My project is to design an (OSS) web-game that helps a broad, web based audience become invested in and curious about their own happiness. The details of the game are more sketched in sand than written in stone, but consider:

• The Happiness Brothers, where there is a 'kindness flower' instead of a fire flower
• A game that shows you that being miserable because you got a C on a test makes no sense
• A game where players trade compliments instead of blows

All of these examples would be backed up with specific concepts, science, and previous work.

The ESP Game was developed by Luis von Ahn to generate a corpus of labeled images. It works by giving Internet users a fun experience, the byproduct of which is labeled images. Internet users are paired anonymously (they don't know each other) and asked to label images. Only if both players type the same word is the image considered labeled (popular labels can be excluded via 'taboo' words) - thus the 'ESP'. In roughly three years since the game's launch, over 15,000,000 images have been labeled.

Martin Seligman is a former head of the American Psychological Association, who is the primary founder of a subfield in psychology called Positive Psychology. Positive Psychology goes beyond pathology and abnormal psychology and considers 'how to go from plus two to plus seven... not just how to go from minus five to minus three'. The field was founded in 1998, and in 2002 Seligman wrote Authentic Happiness and released an accompanying website, which summarize for the lay person this science of happiness.

I believe that by remixing these two powerful concepts - understanding what people find fun and entertaining, and understanding happiness scientifically, it may be possible to make a large audience qualitatively happier.

Other Benefits:

One area of research in Positive Psychology is into a state called Flow. Pioneered by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow is approximately the science of being 'in the zone'. Learning about the science behind Flow, and how to maximize time spent in Flow, could have a positive effect on programmer productivity.