FIELDS OF PLAY: “We have been playing games for nearly as long as we have been human,” writes researcher and game designer Jane McGonigal. As for the future, McGonigal believes that games have the power not only to make us happier, but also to lead us toward solutions to our most pressing, complex social problems.

Jane McGonigal

JaneMcGonigal was a stagemanager turned theater-studies grad studentwhen she went to work for a startup company—The Go Game—that was working to bring video games played on smartphones into the real world, using San Francisco neighborhoods as game environments. McGonigal was so impressed with the games’ abilityto create lasting

change in the emotions and interactions of the people who played them that she switched her research at UC Berkeley to focus on games. That was a decade ago, and since then, McGonigal’s confi-

dence in the power of games has only grown.Now one of the world’s leading researchers on game design and the director of game research and development at the Palo Alto–based Institute

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for the Future, McGonigal has helped design collaborative games, including ones aimed at addressing theworld’smostcom- plex problems.“We can no longer afford to view games as sep- arate from our real lives and our real work,” she writes in Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change theWorld.“It is not only a waste of the potential of games to do real good—it is simply untrue.”

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