SuperMe

View the Project details, Screenshots, Flash Games, Results, Reviews and Contact details.

Project Details

The Brief

Somethin' Else and Coney were commissioned by Channel 4 Education to produce a report which investigated teenage mental health and happiness. The research identified resilience as an area of psychology which could be learned at any life stage and more importantly, that improved resilience increases overall happiness and well-being. The project focusses specifically on helping teens to improve and develop their personal agency, reflection skills, connectedness, signature strengths and grit.

Project Summary

SuperMe is an online game which teaches resilience through play. It’s a meta-game made up of many parts: immersive games, short videos, quizzes and written content. Inside each piece of content are hidden achievements and experience points. Players are taken on a unique journey of self-belief and discovery, and based on their strengths and weaknesses and the SuperMe system sends them to new content via messaging inside the browser.

The Video

There are three series of video:

• Celebrity Comebacks are short documentaries featuring celebrities including Shaun Wright-Phillips and Richard Bacon, who talk about how they dealt with difficult personal life experiences.
• Ordinary Magic is a four-part series which uses documentary and dramatic story-telling to draw the audience into stories and debates about happiness, overcoming crisis and how to take control of life.
• Quotemations were produced by four talented young animators, and focus on simple life lessons using humour and wit.

A User-centred Production

During pre-production Coney facilitated game design sessions within schools and youth theatre groups, which allowed the SuperMe team to take a user-centred approach. During the remainder of the project a group of 30 teenagers joined a private MAKERS group on Facebook and became an integral part of the production process.

Our Suggested Route

Start on www.playsuperme.com. Watch something on the Video page (try The Lab) all the way through, then log into Facebook when prompted (although it works without).

Play FloMo or a game the system suggests a couple of times, and then try one of the quizzes.

Go to the Cheat Codes page. Make sure you look at the dashboard (click on the “Click Me” to explore your scores and achievements in detail). This should demonstrate the quality of all the elements and the innovative metagame, and its implementation.

The marketing / syndication strategy is best viewed by visiting the YouTube channel or Facebook app / fan page, or playing a game via Miniclip while not logged in to Facebook. Our YouTube channel is at http://www.youtube.com/user/playsuperme and Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/playsuperme which also has a link to our application.

Notes

Suggested Special Category: Strategy

The project’s strategy was created by synthesising the psychological research with how teens see the subject area, and a brutally user-centred assessment of how they use the web. This included scrupulous, deep exploration of how the games function. The dwell times tell an interesting story: while average dwell time is an impressive 6:38, referrals from Google average at 11 minutes; from Miniclip at 8 minutes. The mean average bounce rate on the games is 0.05%. Our strategy is helping us reach our target audience and they are staying on the site using the site in the way we planned.

We aimed to make this a genuinely cross-discipline project and are proud there’s no weak links. It contains absolutely top-quality linear video, games, text, graphic design and interactive functions, made by a passionate team with a rigorously shared understanding of not just the objectives and subject matter, but how it would all be unified inside a single interactive system. Particularly, the scoring / achievements functions and notifications provide powerful, directed calls-to-action for a user through the overall system.

Screenshots

See the full sets on Flickr: Website and Video, Games

The Games

Working in collaboration with Somethin' Else, Preloaded developed four games. Each game illustrates and underlines a fundamental principle of resilience:

• Flomo introduces the concept of ‘flow’ and developing focus and grit.
• Linkem encourages players to develop strong connections in life.
• Proximity is a multiplayer game where collaborative play reaps rewards.
• Swerveball rewards players who can reflect accurately on previous play.

The games are available on Miniclip, Kongregate and Newgrounds, which helps to drive traffic to the main website and increase the reach of all the project’s wider content. Smartphone apps for the games are currently in production.

Results

SuperMe launched mid-July 2010. It has currently attracted the following:

• More than 1 million minigame plays
• 80,000 visits to the website
• 46,000 views on YouTube
• The average time spent on the site is 5m

SuperMe was awarded the Media Guardian MEGA: Technology for Social Change

SuperMe was nominated for two BIMA awards: Educational & Outreach Award and Multi-Platform.

Reviews

‘Absolutely brilliant game – the best resilience resource bar none I’ve seen so far’

Sophie Haworth, Chief Executive, Resilience, The Young Foundation

‘It's the best bit of public service media aimed at teens you will see this year. Full stop.’

Hugh Garry, Senior Producer, BBC A&Mi

‘The best bit is, poking around in here and playing these games, watching these vids: it's all officially good for you ;-)’

Alice Taylor, Commissioning Editor, Channel 4 Education

‘This is another provocative piece of work that indicates a trend that is finally coming to its own: Life is a game.’

Joshua S — The Imagination Age

Other reviews and online activity: Wired Online review, Guardian review, Wonderland Blog review, The Imagination Age Blog review, Phil Gyford (contributor) and Hugh Garry review.

Contact details

For any further information please contact: