There are many meters in video games. There are meters for strength, stamina, magic, hunger, thirst, XP, and even sanity. And in some games, meters also represent the moods of others: in "Guitar Hero," the rock meter shows how agitated the audience is; in "Frostpunk," the meter shows the hopes and frustrations of the survivors; in "Cities: Cities:Skylines," the meter shows the Happiness (and unhappiness) is indicated by the meter. [It feels like the most videogame-y thing ever that mathematicians at the University of Vermont have developed a real-world happiness meter.

It's called the "hedonometer," and it analyzes word usage on Twitter in an attempt to determine the global temperature of people's emotions. The Hedonometer website states, "Our hedonometer is based on people's online expressions, leveraging data-rich social media to measure how people present themselves to the outside world." The first version of hedonometer.org uses Twitter as its source, but in principle it can be extended to any data source in any language"

.

Here's how it roughly works: the "5,000 most frequently used words" collected from sources such as Google Books, New York Times articles, Twitter, and song lyrics are assigned a "happiness score" from 1 to 9 (1 being the saddest and 9 the happiest). Global output from Twitter is then collected and analyzed.

"This stream reflects a 10% random sampling of the approximately 500 million messages posted to [Twitter] each day and consists of approximately 100 GB of raw JSON each day. Words in messages that we determine are written in English are thrown into a large bag containing approximately 200 million words per day. A happiness score is then assigned based on the average happiness of the words in this bag.

I have several concerns about this happiness meter. First, like Twitter itself, it is extremely US-centric, and figuring out how Americans feel about things is not (in my opinion) some sort of elaborate mystery. We never shut up. Also, the simple act of looking at Twitter makes me immediately unhappy and thus more likely to type unhappy words into Twitter. If a tool used to collect something for measurement affects what is being measured, I don't think it is a great tool. It would be like drinking fresh water coming out of a rusty bucket and wondering why it tastes like metal.

But there is an interesting aspect to examining word usage and determining whether a word is happy or sad: on Gimlet's "Reply All" podcast, host Alex Goldman spoke with one of the creators of the hedonometer, computer scientist and mathematician He spoke with Peter Dodds. For example, until recently, the word "thirsty" meant a certain unhappiness, that you needed a drink and not having one was no fun. But when people on Twitter started using thirsty to mean "horny," it "overwhelmed" the hedonometer system. Said Dodds, "Okay, we're going to scrap the word."

In any case, some of the happiest people in the world are those who don't use Twitter at all, and thus their happiness (filled with not being bombarded with other people's verbal garbage all day long) is probably not captured by the hedonometer at all. I mean, imagine not using Twitter. It must be wonderful.