The last week has been productive and unproductive at the same time. I've talked to my advisor, mentor, and a well known positive psychologist. Later this week I am meeting with the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab - and then flying home. Woot!

It looks like I could be coding on schedule (that is, within a week or so). Here's the some design principles distilled from our discussions:

So, I suspect my blog posts are going to be a standard deviation or two from the mean. For one, I'm not writing any code yet, and may not be for two weeks, until I get back to Berkeley. This time is incredibly important though, because I will be drilling down on the nature of the game I want to create.

My over-arching research agenda is to explore effective means for making large groups of people happier. The field of positive psychology has been around for eight years, and it is ripe for application. For SoC, I'll be writing an Open Source web game. Here are three primary goals for the game:

1) Be fun
2) Increase, in some measurable way, long-term subjective well being
3) Be widely applicable