Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world-renowned designer of games designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World(Penguin Press, 2011), SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient—Powered by the Science of Games (Penguin Press, 2015), and Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things that Seem Impossible Today (Spiegel & Grau, 2022). She is also the inventor of SuperBetter, a game that has helped more than one million players tackle real-life health challenges such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury. She has created and deployed award-winning games in more than 30 countries on six continents, for partners such as the American Heart Association, the International Olympics Committee, the World Bank Institute, and the New York Public Library. She specializes in games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, such as poverty, hunger and climate change, through planetary-scale collaboration. Her best-known work includes EVOKE, Superstruct, World Without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, Find the Future, and The Lost Ring. These games have been featured in The New York Times, Wired, and The Economist, and on MTV, CNN, and NPR. A former New Yorker, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Kiyash, twin daughters, and Shetland sheepdogs.