Jane McGonigal Wants You To Be Happy
You might not know it yet, but Jane McGonigal has been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work towards your future happiness. Not only is she a pioneer in the field of Alternate Reality Games (a genre that, she explains, can do a lot for your personal sense of well-being) but as a senior researcher/”future forecaster” at Bay Area think tank The Institute for the Future, she’s a front-runner in improving “quality of life” through game-think. Her SXSWi closing keynote panel today was a fascinating look into McGonigal’s work and research as both a game designer and a future forecaster. “Instead of trying to make games more realistic–more powerful graphics, better AI–I’m trying to make the real world more like games,” she explained. “We need the real world to be better designed so it functions more like a game.” While that might sound like a lofty statement, especially to a non-gamer, McGonigal’s logic is simple: Happiness doesn’t mean what it used to. “Happiness is not a warm puppy,” she asserted. Now, happiness as we (and our future selves) know it is increasingly more about “quality of life,” drawn from “satisfying work to do, the experience of being good at something, time spent with people we like, and the chance to be a part of something bigger.” And–you guessed it–”Nothing gives you these four qualities in higher quantity than games. Multiplayer games gives you chance to be with people you like and be a part of something bigger. Multiplayer games are the ultimate happiness engine.” Fresh from her SXSW Web Awards win for World Without Oil, the first socially conscious ARG tackling a real-life problem, she spoke of the importance of using gaming models to foster social change: “I want to make sure a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032.” Closing out her speech with an impromptu Soulja Boy dance routine per audience request, McGonigal truly appeared to have the “quality of life” algorithm figured out.