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.

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.