Jane McGonigal is a game designer, a games researcher, a future forecaster, and a very playful human being

GAMES

 

As an "alternate reality" designer, she specializes in projects that connect game worlds with the real world.

 

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.

 

RESEARCH

 

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).

 

THE FUTURE

 

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.

 

SPEAKING

 

She loves to travel, give talks, play at festivals, lead workshops and deploy games in interesting places.

Feel free to invite her. While she is there, she will probably roll cookies.
She is especially keen to be invited to London, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavian countries in the summer months.

 

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.

 

TEACHING

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. 

 

MISC.

She has an identical twin sister named KellyShe 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.