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Friday, May 30, 2008

Alternate-Reality Gaming

(via Wiki) Jane McGonigal is a noted 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. Most recently, she has served as the director for The Lost Rin, an alternate reality game sponsored by McDonald's and designed as a tie-in to the 2008 Summer Olympics. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in August 2006, and currently teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a Research Affiliate to the Institute for the Future.

Jane McGonigal's talk at the 2008 New Yorker Conference, 'Stories from the Near Future' was inspiring and educational. http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/mcgonigal

Useful links:
www.avantgame.com
www.iftf.org

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