The document describes the development of a board game called Happify to educate the public about concepts of subjective well-being (happiness) in an engaging way. The game incorporates research findings on how memory, mood, and adaptation impact happiness over time. Volunteers created game mechanics and cards to illustrate how various life experiences and activities can positively or negatively influence subjective well-being. Through playtesting, they refined the prototype and hosted an event where over 30 people played and learned while enjoying the game. The creators were able to balance fun gameplay with conveying empirical research findings on happiness.

1. Tunes
Social Psychology
Singapore
The Client
Objectives
Scientific Concepts
Lessons Learnt
• To simplify research on subjective well-being (a.k.a. happiness) into an
accessible format that is relevant and applicable to the general public.
• To create an interactive board game that is both engaging while
fulfilling the main aim of educating players; helping them understand
the science of happiness as well as the strategies they can adopt to
improve their subjective well-being.
• Run entirely by volunteers, Social Psychology (Singapore) is a group
dedicated to exploring complex topics of Psychology in a simple, relatable
way.
• Sessions are organized that span from seminars to workshops allowing
members to come together to discuss and learn about interesting topics in
Psychology.
• The group is especially interested in areas of Psychology that are easy to
digest and/or relevant to the general public & everyday life.
• Studies have shown that subjective well-being can be defined as the frequency of
positive affect, infrequency of negative affect, and overall life evaluation (Diener & Diener,
2008). This can be better understood in terms of the remembering self (memories you
have which affect your life evaluation) and the experiencing self (your current mood)
which was introduced in our board game.
• The mechanism of adaptation was also introduced. We discussed the innate ability of
humans to adapt to significant positive/negative events (Diener & Diener, 2008) and, as a
result, how small and frequent positive activities are crucial in keeping moods positive.
• Various other concepts (e.g. money, relationships, prosocial behaviors, gratitude,
meditation, shopping, and holidays) and their effects on subjective well-being were also
integrated.
What We Did
• We consulted an in-house game expert, Professor Tschang. We were also
inspired by the existing board game 'Tokaido' and 'Game of Life'.
• We incorporated the mechanisms of memory, mood, and adaptation into
the game. The goal of the game was to attain the greatest number of
“happiness points”, which we defined as “positive memories”. These were
accumulated through various “landing spots” on the board that
corresponded to different card decks.
• We created and designed game cards from scratch based on research into
subjective well-being. For example, choosing to land on a Lifestyle “landing
spot” may result in drawing the card “Run a marathon”. This has the effect
of reducing your current mood (feeling terrible pain running such a long
distance). In the long run, however, this increases your “happiness points”.
because recalling the time you ran a marathon may be a happy memory.
• After the game was completed, we tested our prototype on a small
sample of friends and further refined the existing ideas behind it.
• We ended our project by hosting 30 participants from SPS, where they
were given the opportunity to play our final product! We also held a short
talk to explain in further detail the key concepts embedded in the game!
• We learnt to navigate the precarious balance between the elements
that make a game fun and interesting while also bearing in mind the
importance of empirical research.
• Although we were first given the base game of Game of Life to adapt,
we decided to switch to Tokaido after many sessions of play-testing
where we found out that element of providing players with a choice was
crucial (in order for them to learn properly the implications of the
decisions they made in the game).
• Most importantly, we learned that anything is possible if we set our
minds to it! Initially, when we learned about the objectives of the game,
we thought that it would be impossible to create a game that would be
fun yet stay true to the goal of educating the public. In the end we
managed to create a game that was engaging and simple enough to
understand for people of all ages (infants and toddlers not included).
Done By:
Calvin Loo
Felicia Ang
Isabel hilario
Lee Junhui
Zhang Qijia
The Final Products!
Testing the prototype!
D-day: Happify in action!