If you don’t know how you’re aiming to change your players’ lives, you’re not necessarily a bad game designer, but you might be a bad person.

I’ve been feeling guilty about it ever since. Not because it’s not true, but because all too often I’m a massive hypocrit, and don’t have a clear answer to that question myself. Working on SuperMe made me particularly aware of it, since that entire project was about trying to encode more positive ways of thinking into the core mechanics of the games that would sit within it. And, having learned a lot more about happiness from the research Somethin’ Else and Coney undertook for SuperMe, I also now have better tools at my disposal to figure out how to design for happiness, and how to recognise good happiness design in other games.

I’ll do a proper write-up shortly, but for now, here are the slides. Bonus points for anyone who can find me a credit for the awesome photo.

This week’s good things – so far – have been the launch of SuperMe, a Channel 4 project I’ve been working on for a while. It’s a project to help teenagers (and, frankly, the rest of us), develop better mental resiliance, through videos, quizzes, games and useful mind hacks. Working with the team assembled by Somethin’ Else and Preloaded has been a great privilege, and I’ve learned things both about my own brain and my approach to game design generally. The minigames within it are some of my favourite projects from the last few years. Play them here, and let me know what you think.

And then, on cue, Channel 4 goes as wins Publishing Hero at the Develop Awards. I’m gutted not to have been there, and very proud to have been connected with some bold commissioning and fantastic projects. Although, I confess, I think C4 didn’t really deserve to win this year, but only cos next year’s slate is so amazingly awesome. They’re going to run out of hyperbolic award titles at this rate.

And why wasn’t I there? Cos I was debuting Couple Up, the game made by the participants of this week’s WonderLab. WonderLab was three days of performers and playmakers coming together to do what you do in a lab – tinker, theorise, experiment and make. A fantastic group of musicians, writers, composers, actors, directors, producers, commissioners, game designers, coders, artists and philosophers and spent three days sharing their brains. I’ve rarely had a greater treat than getting to lead their explorations.

Everyone who attended the lab – speakers and visitors and participants – was asked to speak for five minutes on something which blew their mind (or, if I was feeling a bit more articulate, something which amazed or delighted them). Some spoke about personal experiences, some about their work. Many of them exceeded their five minutes a little, but we all forgave them, as I’m confident will you. All those talks are available over at WonderLab’s YouTube channel, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

I can’t begin to pick favourites, but if you’re a game designer you might want to start with Tassos Steven’s talk. If you’re a musician, you might be interested in hearing from Momus or Pat Kane. If you’re a sound or graphic designer, perhaps with Nick Ryan. If you’re at all interesting in creativity (or indeed copyright), you might want to hit Mark Earls first (in a good way). If you’re smart enough to be interested in people you haven’t heard of yet (and trust me, I mean yet), try Jason Anthony. If you want to think about how fragile and beautiful interaction can be, start with Melanie Wilson, or perhaps choose to examine the value of anticipation with Aleks Krotoski. If you want a big fat perspective check – in all kinds of ways – then maybe with Kati London, Jo Twist or Malcolm Sutherland. If you want to think about why playing with pain is interesting, with Paul Bennun. Or, if you want to instantly go and drop £30 on Amazon, with Tom Armitage. Then you might want to hear about performing games from Richard Lemarchand, or help Maurice Suckling explore the infinite. And, if all else fails, you can watch mine to discover the heckle that’s going to haunt me for a thousand talks to come.

I’m not supposed to say this about my own event, but it was basically the best conference I’ve ever been to, even though it was only a conference for an hour or two a day. We’ll be posting up news of Couple Up, the game that represents the digest and distillation of all our experiments in the next couple of days. We’re really looking forward to hear what you make of it.

1) Do you know any really good Flash coders looking for a job?
2) Do you know any good freelance game designers looking for work?

My answer is always: not enough, so I thought I’d give the internet a shout. The Flash jobs are usually full-time at profitable, personable game indies or digital agencies. The game design gigs are often project-by-project, and are looking for people with proven game design and delivery skills (so have you conceived, fleshed out and finished something), rather than necessarily any particular professional qualifications or experience.

If either of those things sound like interesting opportunities, do feel free to get in touch (there’s a Contact link over on the right). I can’t promise anything at all – not even a response if I’m feeling scatterbrained, I fear – but I will pass on details to companies looking to hire where it looks like there’s a good potential match.

Spore: what seriously happened.

Stop Wasting My Time And Your Money: why your game doesn’t need a story to be a hit.