Webstock - 16-20 February 2009, Wellington, New Zealand

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Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal

Game designer and future forecaster Jane McGonigal takes both work and 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, while at the same time creating the same types of games professionally. 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 collective intelligences. As one of the world’s first and foremost ARG designers and the leading academic researcher in this field, Jane’s work focuses on how meaningful play can teach 21st century skills to improve people’s thinking and social relations. And, as a future forecaster, Jane has pioneered the use of massively collaborative games to probe the issues of our future and worked to proactively solve impending difficulties. 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. She has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was also a member of their ALPHA Lab, a center for research in automation and robotics. Jane is also a former resident game designer of the Berkeley Institute of Design.

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