Jane McGonigal
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| Jane McGonigal | |
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 Jane McGonigal at Foo Camp in 2008 |
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| Born | October 21, 1977 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Occupation | game designer, games researcher |
| Official website | |
Jane McGonigal (born 1977) is a noted game designer and games researcher, specializing in pervasive gaming and alternate reality games. She worked with alternate reality game design company 42 Entertainment from 2004 to 2006, on projects including I Love Bees (2004) as Community Lead/Puzzle Designer, and Last Call Poker (2005) as Live Events Lead. Additionally, she has collaborated on commissioned games for the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
In recent years, McGonigal has grown especially interested in the way that massively multiplayer online gaming generates collective intelligence, and interested in the way that the collective intelligences thus generated can be utilized as a means of improving the world, either by improving the quality of human life or by working towards the solution of social ills. She has expressed a desire that gaming should be moving "towards Nobel Prizes."[1] These ideas informed her collaboration in World Without Oil (2007), a simulation designed to brainstorm (and potentially avert) the challenges of a post-peak oil future.
More recently, she has served as the director for The Lost Ring, an alternate reality game sponsored by McDonald's and designed as a tie-in to the 2008 Summer Olympics, and as the game director for Superstruct, a "massively multiplayer forecasting game [2]" developed in 2008 by the Institute for the Future .
She received her PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in August 2006, and has taught game design and game theory at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Berkeley. She is also Director of Game Research & Development at Institute for the Future.
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[edit] Acclaim
I Love Bees received a 2005 Innovation Award from the International Game Developers Association and a 2005 Games-related Webby.
In 2006, Dr. McGonigal was named one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35 by MIT's Technology Review. [3]
In 2008, Dr. McGonigal was named one of the Top 20 Most Important Women in videogaming, [4] and World Without Oil received the South by Southwest Interactive Award for Activism.
[edit] External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jane McGonigal |
[edit] Writings
- Avant Game (McGonigal's blog)
- This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (McGonigal's dissertation)
- This Is Not a Game
- A Real Little Game
[edit] Games
- The Lost Ring (2008)
- World Without Oil (with Ken Eklund) (2007)
- Cruel 2 B Kind (with Ian Bogost) (2006)
- I Love Bees (with 42 Entertainment) (2004)
- Demonstrate (2004)
- PlaceStorming (2005)
- TeleTwister (2004)
[edit] Interviews
[edit] References
- ^ Strickland, Eliza. "Play Peak Oil Before You Live It", Salon.com., July 10, 2007.
- ^ http://superstructgame.net/s/about_the_project
- ^ Technology Review, "2007 Young Innovators Under 35"
- ^ Gamasutra", "Gamasutra Top 20"
