Jane McGonigal Travels from San Francisco, USA

More about Jane

Jane has created games for organizations such as the World Bank, the Olympic Games, the American Heart Association, the New York Public Library, and many more.

Jane's other healthcare games include collaborations with the American Heart Association and the Myelin Repair Foundation.

Her new book, SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient (debuted at #7 on the New York Times Advice bestsellers list under four categories - health, science, games and self-help!), reveals a decade’s worth of scientific research into the ways all games change how we respond to stress, challenge, and pain. She shares stories and data from players who have followed the SuperBetter rules to get stronger, happier, and braver in the face of depression, anxiety, illness, and injury. SuperBetter will be available in Australia in early 2016.

Her previous book, Reality Is Broken: How Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World, is a New York Times bestseller. In this engaging, forward-thinking book, Jane makes the case that the gamer spirit — an attitude offun, dedicated, collective problem-solving — is our greatest asset as we face the social, economic, and environmental problems of the 21st century.

Jane herself is a specialist in this field, a designer of alternate reality games, where a real-life activity is re-framed as a game. Players of Jane's games face challenges as serious as surviving peak oil or establishing local sustainable businesses. And they face them with courage and creativity, inspired by their gameful state of mind. Persistence, energy, collaborative creativity, a sense of purpose in hard work — games unlock all of these powerful attitudes. And, most importantly of all, this approach restores to contemporary life the kind of heroism and communal striving that most of us struggle so hard to find.

She is currently an advisor and affiliate researcher with the Institute For The Future in Palo Alto, California, where she served for four years as the Director of Game Research and Development. Her recent projects include a Games for Healthcare initiative with IFTF and the White House as well as Paths Out Of Poverty, a crowdsourcing game by IFTF for the Rockefeller Foundation.

Credentials and Honors

• 2013's Entrepreneurial Women to Watch, Entrepreneur
• Advisor and affiliate researcher, Institute For The Future, a non-profit futures research group based in Palo Alto, California
• Former Director of Game Research and Development, IFTF
• Author of the New York Times bestsellers, SuperBetter and Reality Is Broken
• PhD, University of California at Berkeley in performance studies
• “Young Global Leader” and featured speaker at the Annual Meeting at Davos, World Economic Forum (2012) 2-time winner of the Most Important Futures Work of the Year from the Association of Professional Futurists (2010, 2012)
• #1 Social Impact Game of the Year, Games for Change (2011)
• Honored by Game Developer Magazine as one of the 50 people making the biggest impact in games
• One of Top 10 Scientists To Watch for 2011, The New York Times
• Creativity Magazine's Creativity 50 2011
• Named by Oprah Winfrey as one of the twenty most inspiring women in the world, O Magazine, 2010