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Jane McGonigal, Ph.D. (born 1977) is a 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." 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" developed in 2008 by the Institute for the Future. In 2010, McGonigal worked on Evoke, an ARG project for the World Bank Institute about social and technological innovation and development.

She received her BA in English from Fordham University, and 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.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jane McGonigal", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0