Jane McGonigal Resident Game Designer, Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, USA "Collective Intelligence Games for Global Development"
Video
Speech
Presentation

Short biography:

Game designer and future forecaster Jane McGonigal takes 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 - and she creates massively multiplayer games that are doing just that.

As a designer, Jane is known as the "queen bee of alternate reality games"
(ARGs), a leading-edge genre of collaborative computer games designed to create global collective intelligences. As a future forecaster, Jane is pioneering the use of ARGs to build communities to probe the future and solve its problems. 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, and in
2007 she was the first woman keynote speaker in the 21-year history of the Game Developers Conference. In 2006, MIT Technology Review named her one of the top 35 innovators changing the world through technology. She 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.

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Last updated: 18 Dec 2007