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About Me

Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games -- or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems.

She believes game designers are on a humanitarian mission -- and her #1 goal in life is to see a game developer win a Nobel Prize in Peace or Medicine.

She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011) and is the inventor of SuperBetter, a game that has helped more than 200,000 players tackle real-life health challenges such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury.

She has created and deployed award-winning games, sports, and secret missions in more than 30 countries on six continents, for partners such as the American Heart Association, the International Olympics Committee, the World Bank Institute, and the New York Public Library. She specializes in games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, such as poverty, hunger and climate change, through planetary-scale collaboration. Her best-known work includes EVOKE, Superstruct, World Without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, and The Lost Ring. These games have been featured in The New York Times, Wired, and The Economist, and on MTV, CNN, and NPR. Jane is also a future forecaster. She has served as the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit research group in Palo Alto, California. Her research focuses on how games are transforming the way we lead our real lives, and how they can be used to increase our resilience and well-being. Her future forecasting work has been featured in The Economist, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, O(prah) Magazine, Fast Company, The New York Times Science section, and more.

She has a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in performance studies, and has consulted and developed internal game workshops for more than a dozen Fortune 500 and Global 500 Companies, including Intel, Nike, Disney, McDonalds, Accenture, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Before joining IFTF, she taught game design and game theory at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute.

She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Games for Change, and for the annual Serious Games Summit at the Game Developers Conference.

A former New Yorker, she now lives in San Francisco with her husband Kiyash and Shetland Sheepdog Meche.

Location:
United States, San Francisco, CA
Current organization:
Institute for the Future
Past organizations:
SuperBetter Labs, Nike
Current role:
Game Designer + Inventor
Gender:
Female
Areas of expertise:
Game Design, Positive Psychology, Sport and Athletics, the future, Post-Traumatic Growth
I am:
Athlete, Buddhist, Designer, Inventor, Performer, World traveler
Associations:
Young Global Leader, WEF, Games for Change, Board Member
My website links:
Jane McGonigal's Secret HQ, Reality is Broken
TED conferences attended:
TEDGlobal 2013, TED2013, TEDGlobal 2012, TED2010
Member Picture

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More About Me

I'm passionate about

making reality work more like a game, helping

Talk to me about

games that can make a better world, inventing new sports, getting SuperBetter and post-traumatic growth, positive psychology, the future of theater, games and religion

People don't know that I'm good at

inventing games for dogs, and running half-marathons

Comments

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  • A reply on Conversation: We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames. Is it worth it? How could it be MORE worth it?

    Feb 16 2011: That's such a great point. I wonder what it will take to get there. Do we need a more nuanced vocabulary that everyone understands -- the way we can talk about "documentaries" or "experimental shorts" or "animated" or "romantic comedies"...? Or is that not a fine enough grain... or maybe the wrong grain? Do we need to to talk about games that "make you feel" or "make you think" or "make you move" or "make you act", for example, which is closer to how we talk about and evaluate other media. Hmmmm... It would certainly be a good way to think about experimental game design!

  • A reply on Conversation: We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames. Is it worth it? How could it be MORE worth it?

    Feb 16 2011: You probably have friends and family and colleagues who appreciate and support your gameplay and work in games. :) Not everyone is so lucky! A lot of gamers do struggle to help friends, family or colleagues understand what they're getting out of gaming... and face a lot of pressure to spend less time gaming. So I think it's a fair question -- is there a way to really understand what we get from games and to talk about it with non-gamers? I do agree, however, with the idea that "when the student is ready the game will appear." :) I'd love to hear stories about the games that appeared at the right time for the right person, and how that game changed their ideas about what games can do and be. Stories please! :)
  • +1

    A reply on Conversation: We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames. Is it worth it? How could it be MORE worth it?

    Feb 16 2011: That's such a great way to describe the experience of gaming -- "how powerfully games can move players to care about learning." One of my favorite worldchanging projects is Quest to Learn, which uses game design to inform the schedule and curriculum of an entire middle school. I'm not sure many folks are aware of just how many resources Quest to Learn has put online, so you can learn about the philosophy of the school, see sample schedules and classes and learning quests and "boss battles". There are tons of downloads -- like sample curriculum -- here: http://q2l.org/downloads
  • +1

    A reply on Conversation: We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames. Is it worth it? How could it be MORE worth it?

    Feb 16 2011: I don't think it's wishful thinking at all! :) At gameful.org, we're tracking games that are trying to channel gameplay for real world-ends. My favorite right now is EteRNA, which you can play at http://eterna.cmu.edu/content/EteRNA in order to help scientists work on cures for diseases like cancer and Alzheimers. You play by designing RNA in a virtual environment -- the tiny molecules at the heart of every cell. There's a weekly competition to design the RNA that "folds" best, and then scientists synthesize it for real in their lab. You don't need any scientific training or background to play.

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