What We Do
Jane McGonigal
IFTF Research Affiliate
Chief Creative Officer, SuperBetter Labs
Jane McGonigal 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.
She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011), and currently serves as Creative Director for Social Chocolate, where she is making games powered by the science of positive emotion and social connection.
Jane has created and deployed award-winning games 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. She 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, 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 currently serves as the Director of Games Research and Development at the Institute for the Future, where 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 work has been featured in 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!)
She currently serves on the advisory board for Games for Change, and for the annual Serious Games Summit at the Game Developers Conference.
A former New Yorker, she now lives in San Francisco with her husband Kiyash and Shetland Sheepdog Meche.