Healthy Christchurch is no longer involved with The Wellbeing Game from 2015 onwards.
The Wellbeing Game is now being run by the Mental Health Foundation.
Visit the The Wellbeing Game website for more information.
The Wellbeing Game: created by Healthy Christchurch
Positive mental health practices can make a real difference in Kiwis’ lives. The Wellbeing Game was created as an easy way to introduce the Mental Health Foundation’s Five Ways to Wellbeing into your everyday life.
The Five Ways are simple, everyday practices to help Kiwis support and sustain their own mental wellbeing: Connect, Give, Take Notice, Keep Learning and Be Active. They’re proven to enhance people’s experience of life.
Participants in the Wellbeing Game play as part of a team or as an individual and log time on their online account whenever they practise one of the Five Ways to Wellbeing.
Teams can watch as their combined wellbeing hours grow and keep track as they climb the nationwide leader board. This year there are amazing prizes up for grabs for participating teams. Best of all everyone who plays will be consciously fostering their mental wellbeing.
Observations about The Wellbeing Game 2013
Nearly 2000 participants had four weeks practice at seeing how the little things we do keep us well, bring us joy, meaning and connect us to others - the very stuff of happiness, resilience and a life well lived. The annual game went Nation-wide for the first time and we can be proud of the results.
Most of the records from 2012 were blitzed:
- Total hours: 46,205 in 2013 compares with 31,304 in 2012 - a 48 percent increase. This is about 5.3 years of happiness - or even more staggering: roughly 23 years of full-time working weeks spent on increasing the happiness and wellbeing of New Zealand!
- Total activities: 32,944 an increase of 55 percent from 2012
- Total players: 1982 compared to 1,105 in 2012 - a 79 percent increase
- Total teams: 252 a hundred more than last year (51 percent increase)
Top Team and Players from the 2013 Wellbeing Game
Teams were ranked on our scoreboard according to hours per player:
- Top Team under 7 players: SPK Koffie Group from Solid Energy - Spring Creek, a team of 4 - 692 hours and 30 minutes
- Top Team 7-10 players: TII Admin Allstars from Trades Innovation Institute, team of 10, 1,298 hours
- Top Team over 10 players: West is Best from Community and Public Health West Coast, team of 12, 1,294 hours and 20 minutes
Thank you to everyone who joined and played the game. We loved seeing all the inspiring ways in which people look after their wellbeing. Making our lives the most fun, challenging and rewarding game we possibly can is our mission - and we clocked it.
Mission accomplished. Until next year's game - your life is still a game worth playing - live well, play well!
Networker or Observer? Working the new features and badge
Adapted from the Mental Health Foundation's MindNet newsletter: 24th October 2013
Developer Chris Ambrose says new features have been added to create more layers and connections within the game for 2013.
- Thumbs up lets one player alert another that their activities have inspired them. The feature also provides an automatically updating news feed of activities most recently given a thumbs-up.
- Follow you/Follow me allows a player to opt in to letting other players follow their activities, and can also choose to follow other players. You can then visit a page on the game site which allows you to see activities most recently added by your "followed" players. This feature was requested by people who wanted an opportunity to check in on people who had added particularly interesting or inspiring wellbeing activities.
- Team events: players can add Wellbeing related events to share with their team members, who are sent an email reminder about these events.
- Cool new avatars based upon the "All Rightie" characters from the Christchurch All Right? campaign.
There are also some great new badges:
- 'Happy Snapper' for players who upload pictures to the game associated with their game entries;
- 'Ringleader' for people who add team events; and
- 'All Right Booster' for people who use the Awesome Thumbs-Up button to give positive feedback to other players.
There are a mass of badges people can collect, including some basic level one badges and many more for higher levels of achievement. There are also random badges such as the 'Unicorn of Happiness'.
Players have won a total of over 6,000 badges. Currently most awarded is the 'Ox of Wellbeing' badge, followed by the 'Unicorn of Happiness' badge. The rarest badge yet awarded is the 'Very Busy Bee' badge, followed by the the 'Ringleader' badge.