Jane McGonigal is a game designer, a games researcher, a future forecaster, and a very playful human being.
MIT Technology Review named her one of the top 35 innovators changing the world through technology, for her role in pioneering the field of alternate reality gaming.
She has created and deployed games and missions in more than 30 countries on six continents. (She would like to develop a game for Antarctica someday.)
Harvard Business Review called her theory of "alternate reality business" one of the "Top 20 Breakthrough Ideas of 2008", and BrandWeek called her game The Lost Ring the #1 Bright Idea of 2008.
She is a leader in the field of "happiness hacking", a term she coined to describe the application of positive psychology to the design and development of new technologies.
Fast Company named her one of the top 100 Creative People in Business, and Business Week called her one of the Top Innovators to Watch for 2009.
Her alternate reality games have received the Innovation Award from the International Game Developers Association, the Gaming Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and Year in Review honors from The New York Times
She has keynoted SXSW Interactive, the Game Developers Conference, ETech, the National Association of Broadcasters, the Web 2.0 Summit, and more. She is currently represented by the Leigh Bureau for speaking engagements in the U.S. and internationally.
Gamasutra named her one of the 20 Most Important Women in Videogaming in 2008. She received the Changing the Game Award for Women Making a Difference in Business from Advertising Women New York.
She has a PhD from UC Berkeley in performance studies, and is an expert on applying game design and game theory to real work and real business. She has consulted and developed internal game workshops for leading technology companies in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., as well as more than a dozen Fortune Global 500 Companies.
Her games are usually physically active, massively multi-player and highly collaborative.
Her primary goal as a designer is to create large-scale collaborative communities, to improve players' real quality of life, and to solve real-world problems, by overlaying game systems and game content on top of everyday reality.
Her best known projects include Top Secret Dance Off (2009), CryptoZoo (with the American Heart Association, 2009), Superstruct (with the Institute for the Future, 2008), The Lost Ring (with AKQA, 2008) and The Lost Sport (2008), World Without Oil (with Ken Eklund and ITVS, 2007), a collaborative simulation of a global oil shortage; Cruel 2 B Kind (with Ian Bogost, 2006), a real-world assassination game that replaced weapons with random acts of kindness; Tombstone Hold 'Em (with 42 Entertainment and Activision, 2005), which infused historic cemeteries with live adventure; and I Love Bees (with 42 Entertainment and Microsoft, 2004), the groundbreaking alternate reality game that turned 1000 payphones worldwide into a platform for collective intelligence.
Previously, she was a lead designer at 42 Entertainment, the company that invented the genre of alternate reality games.
As a games researcher, she focuses on how games can save the real world.
Most recently, her research has focused on how to teach collaboration strategies and collective
intelligence skills through alternate reality games, and was supported
by the MacArthur Foundation's initiative on digital media and
youth.
She has a PhD in performance studies from UC Berkeley. Her dissertation, "This Might Be a Game", which she completed in 2006, focuses on the ways that alternate reality games influence and change the real world. Her dissertation received the international Leonardo Art + Technology Award for the most significant new media research filed in Fall 2006.
While at UC Berkeley, she was a member of UC Berkeley's Alpha Lab in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and a resident game designer for the Berkeley Institute of Design. Her most widely cited research games include PlaceStormers (2005), Tele-Twister (2003), and Organum (2004).
As a future forecaster, she explores how games are changing the way we conduct and influence real business, real health care, real scientific research, and our real social lives.
She focuses on ways
that alternate reality games in particular could lead to a higher
quality of life in both Western and developing nations, and how they
could produce more engaging and thriving democracies worldwide.
She has been a researcher with the Institute for the Future since January 2007, where she also develops massively multiplayer forecasting games.
She loves to travel, give talks, play at festivals, lead workshops and deploy games in interesting places.
She is currently represented by the Leigh Bureau for speaking engagements and keynotes, here in the U.S. and internationally.
You can watch a video of her 2008 quickfire talk "Saving the World through Game Design" at the New Yorker Conference here.
She has taught numerous courses and seminars on game design and game theory at UC Berkeley and San Francisco Art Institute.
Favorite courses include the undergraduate seminars "Play and Performance" and "Theater and Games" at UC Berkeley, and "Game Design as Art Practice" and "Ubiquitous Play in the Everyday"for the San Francisco Art Institute.
She has an identical twin sister named Kelly. She is not a Cylon. Although she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area now, she is a former New Yorker. She aspires to eventually live in Copenhagen or London.
Her husband Kiyash is a collaborator on all of her game projects, but is better known as a lead producer/editor for Current TV. Her shetland sheepdog Meche is named for the heroine in the all-time best adventure game, Grim Fandango. One of her dreams is to run an international league and world championships for Werewolf. Another dream is to dance in the same room as Shahrukh Khan.
She has a background in live theater, barely survived the first dot-com bubble, and got her professional start in urban Parks & Recreation. She is the reigning Node Runner World Champion, a title earned in 2003, and more recently a member of the 2008 New York City Champion team in the sport Pigeon Pinata Pummel.