Here’s more information about our new project, announced today by Channel 4 Education, as part of their forthcoming slate for the remainder of 2010 — we are *delighted* to be working with commissioner Alice Taylor on this and send a special thanks to collaborators including Preloaded and Coney. Produced by Jo Roach and directed by Paul Bennun, the project’s launching this summer … we’ll have more information then.
Super Me shows teens the control they have over their own happiness and resilience.
Could a game help you to understand happiness, make you more resilient and better at dealing with the hard knocks? In short the answer is yes. Super Me was born from a piece of Somethin’ Else research for Channel 4 Education which showed that there was a huge opportunity for a product which could help teens understand the control they have over their lives and positively affect their future success and happiness.
Built upon positive psychology and resilience, SuperMe is a system of games and videos which simply enable teens to be better at life. As players move through the game by watching videos, reading cheat codes, playing games and answering questions about themselves, SuperMe sends them on a journey based on their strengths and weaknesses.
The project includes contributors such as presenter Richard Bacon, England footballer Shaun Wright-Phillips, model Olivia Inge, Mercury-winning Speech Debelle and grime MC Bashy, who talk about their signature strengths, biggest failures and their own definition of happiness. The games allow single and multiplayer action, and score players depending how resilient they are. Players who can work as a team, who learn how to ‘fail better’ or think more accurately about the past, or who understand the need to persist at the hardest tasks will be the ones with the biggest score.
The winning strategies for Super Me are the winning strategies for life. As with life, it takes a little practice…
The games and videos will be available on a number of platforms, from Facebook and YouTube to users’ own websites. But users will be encouraged to visit a central hub, where all the games and videos can be found, and where the whole project comes alive. The site is wonderfully simple on the surface but fabulously sophisticated, with a scoring system based on psychological research providing appropriate resources and content to help our users boost their scores, in the system and in the ‘real’ world.
Production company Somethin’ Else is a cross-platform production company active in games, television, video-for-web, web design, mobile and radio, winning international awards in all these areas.
