Jane McGonigal
Game designer and future forecaster Jane McGonigal takes play seriously. She writes and speaks about the power of digital games, virtual worlds, and other immersive experiences to change reality and to shape our future — and she creates games that are doing just that. As a designer, Jane is known as the “queen bee of alternate reality games” (ARGs), a leading-edge genre of massively collaborative computer games that use meaningful play to create global collec tive intelligences. As the leading academic researcher of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and one of the world’s first and foremost ARG designers, Jane focuses on how meaningful play can teach 21st century skills and improve people’s thinking and social relations. And as a future forecaster, Jane is pioneering the use of massively collaborative games to probe the future and solve its problems. Her project, “World Without Oil” is the first ARG designed to solve a real-world problem.
Jane has led workshops and deployed games in more than 20 countries. In 2006, MIT Technology Review named her one of the top 35 innovators changing the world through technology. A former lead designer for 42 Entertainment, her “I Love Bees” game, a viral marketing game for Microsoft’s Halo 2, won several awards including the Game Developers Choice Awards’ Innovation Award and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences’ Webby Award. The game was also honored by The New York Times’ 2004 Year in Review.
Jane McGonigal is an affiliate senior researcher with the Institute for the Future and has a Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She is a former member, UC Berkeley’s ALPHA Lab, a center for research in automation and robotics and former resident game designer, Berkeley Institute of Design.