Keynote | Friday’s Opening Keynote
About
Jane McGonigal is a visionary game designer and futurist, and she is harnessing the power of Internet games in new ways to help solve some of the biggest challenges facing our world today and tomorrow. In her engaging, forward-thinking book Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal makes the case that the gamer spirit — an attitude of fun, dedicated, collective problem-solving — is our greatest asset as we face the social, economic, wins. and environmental problems of the 21st century.
She argues that game designers are effectively happiness engineers, experts in making difficult tasks engaging, and that we should draw on their smarts as we frame the challenges of our time.
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. The activity could be as mundane as household chores or as epic as surviving peak oil or estab- lishing local sustainable businesses, the subjects of two of Jane’s own games: whatever the challenge, we can face it more boldly if we bring to it a gameful state of mind.