Jane McGonigal

Early years

McGonigal was brought up in New Jersey. Her parents are teachers and emphasized intellectual attainment. She has an identical twin sister, Kelly McGonigal, who is a well known psychologist.

Studies

McGonigal received her BA in English from Fordham University in 1999, and her PhD in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006.

Personal life

After earning her BA in English, she started developing her first commercial games. In 2006, at the age of 28, she earned a PhD in performance studies and continued developing games. In 2009, she suffered a debilitating concussion that helped her in the development of a game, Jane the Concussion Slayer, for treating her concussion and other similar conditions. The game was later renamed SuperBetter. In 2011, her first book was published. Her sister Kelly is a psychologist and also an author.

Philosophy

McGonigal writes and speaks about alternate reality games and massively multiplayer online gaming, especially about the way that collective intelligence can be generated and used as a means for improving the quality of human life or working towards the solution of social ills. She has stated that gaming should be moving "towards Nobel Prizes." McGonigal has been called "the current public face of gamification". Despite this, McGonigal has objected to the word, stating, "I don't do 'gamification,' and I'm not prepared to stand up and say I think it works, I don't think anybody should make games to try to motivate somebody to do something they don't want to do. If the game is not about a goal you're intrinsically motivated by, it won't work."

Career

As a designer McGonigal became known for location-based and alternate reality games. She has taught game design and game studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008 she became the Director of Game Research & Development at Institute for the Future and in 2012 Chief Creative Officer at SuperBetter Labs.

Games

Jane has been developing commercial games since 2006, some of which are listed in the following chart:

SuperBetter

In July 2009 Jane suffered a concussion after hitting her head in her office. The symptoms were severe and lasted for several weeks, and led to her feeling suicidal. She requested her friends give her tasks to do each day. Wanting to recover from her condition, she created a game to treat it. The game was initially called Jane the Concussion-Slayer (after Buffy the Vampire Slayer), then renamed to SuperBetter. McGonigal was able to raise $1 million to fund an expanded version of the game.

Additionally, she has collaborated on commissioned games for the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Books

On January 20, 2011, McGonigal's first book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can Change the World, was published. In this book, McGonigal looks not only at massively multiplayer online gaming and alternate reality games but also at games more widely. Using current research from the positive psychology movement, McGonigal argues that games contribute powerfully to human happiness and motivation, a sense of meaning, and the development of community.

The book was met with a favorable reception from The Los Angeles Times, and Wired, and mixed reviews from The Independent. The book received criticism from some quarters, notably the Wall Street Journal, which felt that her thesis, which claimed to use games to "fix" everyday life by giving it a sense of achievement and making it seem more fulfilling and optimistic, made "overblown" claims from minor examples, and did not address conflicting individual goals and desires, or the influence of "evil". The New York Times Book Review also criticized some points in her book, calling out the lack of evidence demonstrating that in-game behavior and values could translate into solutions to real world problems such as poverty, disease and hunger.

On September 15, 2015, McGonigal's second book, SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver, and More Resilient, was published by Penguin Press. It was #7 on the New York Times Best Seller: Advice, How-to and Miscellaneous List its debut week.

Publications

1. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, ISBN 978-1-5942-0285-8, (20 January 2011)
2. SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient, ISBN 978-1594206368 (15 September 2015).