Jane McGonigal
- Adrian Holovaty
- Annalee Newitz
- Ben Goodger
- Bruce Sterling
- Cameron Adams
- Damian Conway
- David Recordon
- Derek Featherstone
- Derek Powazek
- Fiona Romeo
- Heather Champ
- Jackson Wilkinson
- Jane McGonigal
- Jasmina Tesanovic
- Joshua Porter
- Matt Biddulph
- Matt Jones
- Michael Lopp
- Meg Pickard
- Nat Torkington
- Pamela Fox
- Russell Brown
- Russ Weakley
- Toby Segaran
- Tom Coates
- Ze Frank
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.
Links:
- Avant Game - Jane McGonigal's blog
- This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century - chapters from Jane's dissertation
- This Is Not A Game: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play
- A Real Little Game: The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play - paper in PDF format
- Creating Alternate Realities - Jane McGonigal on O'Reilly IT Conversations
- Saving the World Through Game Design - Jane McGonigal talks about alternate-reality gaming
- Avant-Gaming: An Interview with Jane McGonigal
