Jane McGonigal

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

Bio

"Jane McGonigal, Ph.D. (born 1977) is a game designer and games researcher, specializing in pervasive gaming and alternate reality games. She worked with alternate reality game design company 42 Entertainment from 2004 to 2006, on projects including I Love Bees (2004) as Community Lead / Puzzle Designer, and Last Call Poker (2005) as Live Events Lead. Additionally, she has collaborated on commissioned games for the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.[citation needed]

In recent years, McGonigal has grown especially interested in the way that massively multiplayer online gaming generates collective intelligence, and interested in the way that the collective intelligences thus generated can be utilized as a means of improving the world, either by improving the quality of human life or by working towards the solution of social ills. She has expressed a desire that gaming should be moving “towards Nobel Prizes.” These ideas informed her collaboration in World Without Oil (2007), a simulation designed to brainstorm (and potentially avert) the challenges of a post-peak oil future." (http://www.phibetaiota.net/2010/10/whos-who-in-collective-intelligence-jane-mcgonigal/)

  • MIT Technology Review named her one of the top 35 innovators changing the world through technology, for her role in pioneering the field of alternate reality gaming.
  • Harvard Business Review called her theory of "alternate reality business" one of the "Top 20 Breakthrough Ideas of 2008", and BrandWeek called her game The Lost Ring the #1 Bright Idea of 2008.
  • She is a leader in the field of "happiness hacking", a term she coined to describe the application of positive psychology to the design and development of new technologies.
  • She has created and deployed games and missions in more than 30 countries on six continents. (She would like to develop a game for Antarctica someday.)
  • Her alternate reality games have received the Innovation Award from the International Game Developers Association, the Gaming Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and Year in Review honors from The New York Times
  • Gamasutra named her one of the 20 Most Important Women in Videogaming in 2008.
  • She has keynoted SXSW Interactive, the Game Developers Conference, ETech, the Web 2.0 Summit, and more. She is currently represented by the Leigh Bureau for speaking engagements in the U.S. and internationally.
  • She has a PhD from UC Berkeley in performance studies, and is an expert on applying game design and game theory to real work and real business. She has consulted and developed internal game workshops for leading technology companies in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., as well as more than a dozen Fortune Global 500 Companies."

(http://www.avantgame.com/bio.htm)