What We Do
Jane McGonigal
Director of Game Research + Development
Jane is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games—or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She believes game designers are on a humanitarian mission—and her #1 goal in life is to see a game developer win a Nobel Peace Prize.
Jane's latest book, IMAGINABLE: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today is now available (Spiegel & Grau, March 2022) is now available. She is the New York Times bestselling author of SUPERBETTER: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver, and More Resilient—Powered by the Science of Games (Penguin Books, 2015) and Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011), and is the inventor and co-founder of SuperBetter, a game that has helped more than 250,000 players tackle real-life health challenges such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury.
She has created and deployed award-winning games, sports and secret missions in more than 30 countries on six continents, for partners such as the American Heart Association, the International Olympics Committee, the World Bank Institute, and the New York Public Library. Jane specializes in games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, such as poverty, hunger and climate change, through planetary-scale collaboration. Her best-known work includes EVOKE, Superstruct, World Without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, Find the Future, and The Lost Ring. These games have been featured in The New York Times, Wired, and The Economist, and on MTV, CNN, and NPR.
Jane is also a future forecaster. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future. Her research focuses on how games are transforming the way we lead our real lives, and how they can be used to increase our resilience and well-being. Her future forecasting work has been featured in The Economist, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, O(prah) Magazine, Fast Company, The New York Times Science section, and more.
She is the founder of Gameful, “a secret headquarters for worldchanging game developers.”
Jane has a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in performance studies, and has consulted and developed internal game workshops for more than a dozen Fortune 500 and Global 500 Companies, including Intel, Nike, Disney, McDonalds, Accenture, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Before joining IFTF, she taught game design and game theory at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute.
She enjoys speaking to global audiences (watch videos). Jane has appeared at TED and the New Yorker Conference, and keynoted SXSW interactive, the Game Developers Conference, the Idea Festival, the National Association of Broadcasters, the Web 2.0 Summit, UX Week, Webstock, and more. Invite her to speak to your organization or at your event. (She especially loves to travel to Asia, the UK, and Scandinavia!)
Jane currently serves on the Board of Directors for Games for Change.
In her newest book Imaginable, Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our minds to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. She invites us to play with the provocative thought experiments and future simulations she’s designed exclusively for this book, with the goal to:
- build our collective imagination so that we can dive into the future and envision, in surprising detail, what our lives will look like ten years from now
- develop the courage and vision to solve problems creatively
- take actions and make decisions that will help shape the future we desire
- access “urgent optimism,” an unstoppable force within each of us that activates our sense of agency
Imaginable teaches us to be fearless, resilient, and bold in realizing a world with possibilities we cannot yet imagine—until reading this transformative, inspiring, and necessary book.
Pre-order a signed, personalized copy via Book Passage before March 22, 2022, and you’ll also get two tickets to my secret virtual book party — with special guests, games and the chance to just hang out together and ask me anything!