Building communities to solve problems
through collective intelligence.

Highlights

World-renowned game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal takes play seriously. She is a leading innovator in the field of game design for future forecasting and problem solving.

She is best known for creating games that inspire global-scale collaboration and collective intelligences. She directed the world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game Superstruct, which brought together more than 7000 future forecasters from 90 countries to tackle real-world problems such as pandemics, food systems, and climate change. The Association of Professional Futurists honored Superstruct as the "Most Important Futures Work of 2008."

Her current game is EVOKE – A crash course in changing the world, a collaborative effort to empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa.

Jane also directed The Lost Ring for McDonalds' and the Summer 2008 Olympic Games. Played by more than 2 million people on six continents, it was called the #1 Bright Idea of the Year by Adweek. Other major projects include the peak-oil forecasting game World Without Oil, the micro-forecasting platform Signtific Labs, and the social network game CryptoZoo for the American Heart Association.

Jane McGonigal is the Director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, where she earned Harvard Business Review honors for "Top 20 Breakthrough Ideas of 2008" for her work on the future of games.

Her research on games and extreme-scale collaboration has been featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times; and on MTV, CNN, BBC, and NPR. In 2009, BusinessWeek called her one of the 10 most important innovators to watch; Gamasutra named her one of the 20 Most Important Women in Videogames; and Fast Company hailed one of the 100 most creative people in business. She has received awards from the International Game Developers Association, the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, and was named one of the top 35 innovators changing the world (MIT Technology Review).

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Happy and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, January 2011)

In her forthcoming book, McGonigal reveals how we can use the lessons of game design to fix what is wrong with the real world. She persuasively argues that those who continue to dismiss games will be at a major disadvantage in the coming years. Gamers, on the other hand, will be able to leverage the collaborative and motivational power of games in their own lives, communities, and businesses. Drawing on positive psychology, cognitive science and sociology, Reality is Broken uncovers how game designers have hit on core truths about what makes us happy, and utilized these discoveries to astonishing effect in virtual environments.

"Jane is a kind of secret weapon. Her work is seminal, and those of us who track new social interactions have had her work on our ‘must-read’ list for years. … The most remarkable thing about Jane's work is that even the extreme conclusions are backed up by careful extrapolation of visible forces: when she says ‘Reality, compared to games, is broken’, that is both a radical statement and a basic observation about the lived experience of millions. When she proposes turning the energy around gameplay to socially positive ends, she is outlining an effort at once astonishing and achievable. It's this kind of work—grounded, accessible and dramatic—that makes her so important."
    — Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody

Projects

Crowd-sourcing the future

EVOKE—A crash course in changing the world
If you have a problem, and you can't solve it alone, EVOKE it
A collaborative effort to empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start tackling the world's toughest problems: poverty, hunger, sustainable energy, water security, conflict, disaster relief, health care, education, human rights.

Superstruct—crowd-sourcing the future of risk
A collaborative forecasting platform for predicting risk and 'superthreats.'
A collaborative forecasting game for the Institute for the Future designed to predict risk and prepare for crisis and 'superthreats' in the future, with several major corporations participating. "Superstruct" means to create structures that go beyond the basic forms and processes with which we're familiar, to collaborate at extreme scales—a new core competency.

Signtific Lab—crowd-souring science & technology
A collaborative web-based platform for identifying disruptive trends.
An innovative and dynamic collaborative web-based platform designed for engaging scientists and technologists from all areas of study in identifying disruptive trends. The platform has three planks: Signals, Notebooks, and Forecasts—recognize indicators, organize for sharing, combine to identify key trends, disruptions, opportunities or shifts in the competitive landscape.

The new face of marketing

The Lost Ring—McDonald's and the 2008 Olympics
A global alternative reality game (ARG) sponsored by McDonald's to connect with younger audiences.
A global, multi-lingual alternative reality game (ARG) sponsored by McDonald's to connect with younger audiences who dislike overt marketing. The first truly global ARG, with more than two million players in more than 100 countries. Culminated in an event at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Won several marketing awards.

I Love Bees—Microsoft and Halo 2
A massive-participatory game designed to support the launch of the video game Halo 2.
Designed to market the release of the video game Halo 2, ILB was a huge marketing success: 250,000 people viewed the ilovebees website when it launched in August 2004, and more than 500,000 returned to the site every time the pages were updated. More than three million visitors returned over the course of three months and thousands of people around the world participated in the game. ILB won numerous awards for innovation and helped spawn a whole series of ARGs for video games.

Solving real-world problems

World Without Oil—global crisis in oil supply
The first ARG designed to solve a real-world problem.
World Without Oil was the first ARG designed to solve a real-world problem—the potential for a major, sustained, global oil shock. It sketched out the overarching conditions for a realistic oil shock and then called upon players to imagine and document their lives under those conditions. The game concluded on June 1, 2007. Since then, many of the events it envisioned have been validated.

The Power of Mass Collaboration

Jane McGonigal is perhaps the world’s leading authority on how to harness the power of mass participation and collaboration organized through game design to create social and business value. The games create new types of communities to solve problems—business, social and scientific—that the participants could never solve by themselves. Jane specializes in structuring the game play so that it inspires collective rather than competitive participation.

She is the leading academic researcher of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and one of the world’s first and foremost ARG designers. In these massively collaborative games, players play both online and in the real world, getting game clues and collaborating via the technologies of ubiquitous computing—Wi-Fi, cell phones, PDAs, GPS devices, and the like.

In 2004, she was the lead community designer for 42 Entertainment’s I Love Bees project to promote Microsoft’s video game Halo 2—the most widely played ARG to date. In 2005, she and the I Love Bees team won the Game Developers Choice Awards’ Innovation Award and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences’ Webby Award. The game was honored by The New York Times’ 2004 Year in Review.

Since then, she has helped design World Without Oil, an Internet-based platform that enabled thousands of people from around the world imagine the impact of a major, sustained global oil shock and explore responses to the crisis and alternatives to an oil-dependent lifestyle. World Without Oil was the first time such a game platform had been used to solve a real-world problem.

Her current project, cosponsored by the 2008 Olympics and McDonalds, is a global immersive adventure titled The Lost Ring. The goal: engage millions of people in discovering a lost Olympic game that will climax at the summer games in Beijing. The tools: participant-created content on new technology platforms, like wikis, videos, podcasts, blogs, and swag. The objective: build a global community, especially among young people, that is invested in the Olympic vision of peaceful cooperation and creative competition.

Customized Live Games, Missions & Challenges

Jane’s games and missions emphasize collective, creative strategies for network culture, and are typically low-tech or no-tech. Games are customized for the occasion and audience, and can be designed as 15-minute quickfire activities for large groups in an auditorium, one or two hour breakout sessions for small groups in working rooms, or continuous background activity for full-day events in any space imaginable. After the play, Jane presents a post-play brief, in which she breaks down key lessons from the group’s experience and connects their play to real-world challenges and opportunities. Inquiries about live games and missions should include group size, as well as time and space available.

Why Games?

At the Institute for the Future, Jane designs games as platforms for collaborative investigation of the future and its problems and possibilities. The Institute calls these skills 'amplified intelligence'—highly social, highly collective, highly improvisational, and highly augmented. Games excel as investigative tools because they offer better opportunities for contribution, build better community, and harness a feeling of heroic purpose coupled with common experience.

Credentials

• Director of Game Research and Development, Institute for the Future
• Former lead designer, 42 Entertainment
• Ph.D. in performance studies, UC Berkeley
• Former member, UC Berkeley’s ALPHA Lab, a center for research in automation and robotics
• Former resident game designer, Berkeley Institute of Design

Awards

• One of the world’s top 35 innovators—MIT Technology Review
• One of the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2009, Fast Company
• One of the top Innovative Voices for 2008, BusinessWeek
• Honored by the Year in Review feature of The New York Times
• Superstruct: Most Important Futures Work of 2008, Association of Professional Futurists
• Her theory of "alternate reality business" named one of the top 20 breakthrough ideas of 2008 by The Harvard Business Review
• Game Developers Choice Awards’ Innovation Award (2005)
• International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences’ Webby Award. (2005)
• Received the Innovation Award, IGDA
• Named to the first ever Women in Games: The Gamasutra 20

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