Jane McGonigal is a game designer, a games researcher, and a future forecaster. 

GAMES

 

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

 

Her games are usually 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 World Without Oil (2007), a collaborative simulation of a global oil shortage; Cruel 2 B Kind (2006), a real-world assassination game that replaced weapons with random acts of kindness; Tombstone Hold 'Em (2005), which infused historic cemeteries with live adventure; and I Love Bees (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. Our I Love Bees game won the 2005 Innovation Award from the International Game Developers Association, the 2005 Games-related Webby Award, and was honored by the New York Times' 2004 Year in Review.

 

RESEARCH

 

As a games researcher, she focuses on how the games we play can change the way we experience the real world. 


Most recently, her research has centered around 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, which she completed in 2006, focused on the way that alternate reality games can influence how both game designers and game players experience, and attempt to 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 is a researcher with the Institute for the Future, where she also develops collaborative forecasting games.

 

SPEAKING

 

She loves to travel and give lectures, lead workshops and deploy games in interesting places.

Feel free to invite her. While she is there, she will probably roll cookies.

 

 

She is currently represented by the Leigh Bureau for speaking engagements and keynotes, here in the U.S. and internationally.

 

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 Kelly. She has a background in live theater, the first dot-com bubble, and urban Parks & Recreation. She is the reigning Node Runner World Champion, a title earned in 2003.