Highlights

Future forecaster Jane McGonigal is a world-renowned designer of innovative ways to use mass collaboration to conduct research, build communities, connect with markets and shape our future. In 2006, MIT Technology Review named her one of the top 35 innovators changing the world through technology.

As a designer, Jane is known as the “queen bee of alternate reality games” (ARGs), a leading-edge genre of massively-collaborative games that use meaningful play to create global collective intelligences.

As a researcher, Jane focuses on new ways to teach 21st-century skills and improve people’s thinking and social relations.

And as a future forecaster, Jane is pioneering the use of massively-collaborative games to build communities to probe the future and solve its problems. Her project World Without Oil is the first such project designed to solve a real-world problem.

Jane McGonigal is an affiliate senior researcher with the Institute for the Future and has a PhD in performance studies from the University of California at Berkeley.

She has led workshops and deployed games in more than 20 countries. In 2007 she was the first woman keynote speaker in the 21-year history of the Game Developers Conference.

A former lead designer for 42 Entertainment, her I Love Bees game (a viral marketing game for the videogame Halo 2) won the 2005 Innovation Award from the International Game Developers Association, the 2005 Games-related Webby Award, and was honored by the New York Times’ 2004 Year in Review. Jane also was named to the first-ever Gamasutra 20, honoring the top 20 women working in the video game industry.

Jane McGonigal

Designer: Jane is the co-creator of World Without Oil, the first alternate reality game to address a real-world problem—oil dependency. Using an interactive website as platform (worldwithoutoil.org), the game simulates a serious, long-lasting oil crisis and invites people to document their life in The New Reality. She’s designed many other games, including I Love Bees, which won several awards, and Cruel 2 B Kind.

Researcher: How can alternative reality games be used to improve people’s lives? Jane studies how meaningful play can teach such skills as “cooperation radar” (the ability to sense the right collaborator for any given task) and “emergensight,” the ability to handle the complex and often surprising results of large-scale systems, just to name two.

Forecaster: World Without Oil is just the beginning. Jane predicts a role for ARGs in all kinds of research in the future and as a way to probe the future and solve its problems. She is developing ways to apply massively-collaborative games to market research, social research, and science.

Profile: Jane brings a truly unique perspective to presentations on the future & technology, innovation & creativity, marketing & branding. She was a lead designer at 42 Entertainment, the company that invented the genre of alternate reality games. She has a Ph.D. in performance studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also was a member of UC Berkeley’s Alpha Lab. She has taught at UC Berkeley and San Francisco Art Institute. She is the Node Runner World Champion of 2003. Jane contributed a chapter to The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games and Learning, from the MacArthur Foundation’s Series on Digital Media and Learning.
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.
Topics

The Power of Innovative Game—What game designers understand (and why everyone outside the game industry needs to understand it, too).

Game designers are solving crucial social, cultural and quality of life problems that the rest of the culture has been ignoring. A gamer’s perspective on how to meet these new needs with products, services and brands.

You 2.0 and Beyond

Jane explores how our massively participatory culture is changing the ways we define ourselves as individuals and how your organization can talk to, create content and products for, and design experiences for the YOU that Time magazine named person of the year for 2006.

Inventing the Future with Game Design

Find out why online games are becoming the most important platform for collaboration and innovation. Game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal explains how games optimize human ability and shows you games that are harnessing the power of collective intelligence to solve real-world problems. Learn the ten collaboration superpowers that online gamers are developing – and how they will change the way we live and do business in the future. After the forecast, you’re invited to develop your own collaboration superpowers by playing Superstruct, the worlds’ first massively multiplayer forecasting game. Set in the year 2019, Superstruct is a collaborative platform for tackling global-scale challenges. In just ten minutes, you can complete your first mission –art inventing the future!

Credentials

• Affiliate senior researcher, 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
• Game Developers Choice Awards’ Innovation Award (2005)
• International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences’ Webby Award. (2005)
• Her theory of “alternate reality business” named one of the top 20 breakthrough ideas of 2008 by The Harvard Business Review
• Received the Innovation Award, IGDA
• Honored by the Year in Review feature of The New York Times
• Named to the first ever Women in Games: The Gamasutra 20