
Jane McGonigal is a
world-renowned game designer.
She is also a
researcher, a
future forecaster, and a very playful human being.
Jane is the Director of Games
Research & Development at the Institute for the Future in
She has created and deployed games and missions in more than 30 countries on six continents. She specializes in games that help gamers enjoy their real lives more -- and games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, through planetary-scale collaboration.
She enjoys speaking to global audiences -- she has appeared at the New Yorker Conference (watch video) and the TED Conference (watch CNN video) and keynoted SXSW interactive, the Game Developers Conference, the Idea Festival, the National Association of Broadcasters, ETech, Web 2.0, UX Week, Webstock, and more. Invite her to speak to your organization or at your event.
She has a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in performance studies, and has consulted and developed internal game workshops for leading technology companies in Asia, Europe, and the US, as well asmore than a dozen Fortune Global 500 Companies.
She currently lives in San Francisco with her husband Kiyash and Shetland Sheepdog Meche. She blogs and tweets.
Her book "Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Happy and How They Can Help Us Change the World" will be published by Penguin Press in January 2011.
(Return to
home)
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 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
Jane has an identical twin sister
named Kelly. She
is not a Cylon. (Neither is her twin.) Although she lives in the San Francisco
Bay Area now, she is a former New Yorker. She aspires to eventually live in