Jane McGonigal at TED 2010

 

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 Palo Alto, California.

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.

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HONORS

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 London, Japan, India, Hong Kong, 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.

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 Copenhagen, Bangkok, and London. Her husband Kiyash is a collaborator on all of her game projects, but is better known as an Emmy-award nominated documentary producer. 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 (update: achieved July 3, 2009). She has a background in live theater, barely survived the first dot-com bubble, and got her professional start in urban Parks & Recreation. She attended Fordham College at Lincoln Center for her undergraduate work. 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.