
Nacido: October 21, 1977 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Jane McGonigal is a game designer, researcher, and futurist whose work explores games, resilience, and collective problem-solving. She is known for the books Reality Is Broken, SuperBetter, and Imaginable, as well as TED talks viewed millions of times, helping popularize game-based approaches to health, learning, and social innovation.
Jane McGonigal built her career at the intersection of game design, psychology, and futures thinking. Raised in New Jersey, she studied English at Fordham University, graduating in 1999, and later earned a Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her early academic work examined the social and psychological dimensions of games at a time when game studies still sat near the edge of the academy. That combination of literary training, performance theory, and experimental design shaped her central premise: games are not merely entertainment, but systems that can organize attention, strengthen agency, and help people work on real problems.
"Jane McGonigal has long been a visionary"
— Daniel H. Pink
"Jane McGonigal's work provides us with a whole new set of tools to make important decisions better, faster, and more transparently"
— Sid Meier
"Jane McGonigal shows a playful doorway to well-being and how much we can gain from training attention"
— Jack Kornfield
"Jane McGonigal's insights have the elegant, compact, deadly simplicity of plutonium, and the same explosive force"
— Cory Doctorow
"Jane McGonigal is unusually adept at anticipating events that most of us can't even fathom"
— Adam Grant
"In Imaginable, futurist Jane McGonigal offers us her outstretched hand"
— Julie Lythcott-Haims
"Jane McGonigal's fascinating, ground-breaking approach shows how living gamefully can help us lead happier, healthier, more engaged lives"
— Gretchen Rubin
"With Imaginable, Jane McGonigal has pulled off a rare and essential feat"
— Steven Johnson
"In Imaginable, Jane McGonigal teaches us to bring soul-stirring imagination to our daily lives"
— Nir Eyal
"Hundreds of thousands of people have had their lives changed by Jane McGonigal's SuperBetter program, and I see why"
— Charles Duhigg