Jane McGonigal presented the keynote at SXSW Interactive on March 11. This description taken from the official SXSW bio….

As a game designer and future forecaster, McGonigal takes play seriously. Currently a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future, Jane McGonigal writes and speaks about the power of digital games, virtual worlds, and other immersive experiences to change reality and to shape our future. As a game designer, she creates massively multi-player experiences that are doing just that. She specializes in collaborative games that blur the line between virtual worlds and the real world. Previously, she was a lead designer at 42 Entertainment, the company that invented the genre of alternate reality games and created the award-winning “I Love Bees” to promote Halo 2. More recently, McGonigal designed the “World Without Oil” game, a collaborative online simulation of a global oil shortage. She has a PhD in performance studies from the University of California. MIT Technology Review named her as one of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35.

In her own words, McGonigal describes herself on her blog… “I’m a game designer, a games researcher, and a future forecaster. I make games that give a damn. I study how games change lives. I spend a lot of my time figuring out how the games we play today shape our real-world future. And so I‘m trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032.”

To my surprise, McGonigal’s keynote was the most inspiring and thought provoking presentation I experienced at the conference. I am not a gamer. I only play video games on the rare occasion that I’m at some social function where it is the primary activity. In all honesty, I tend to view gaming negatively and label it as a “waste of time.” Generally, I am disinterested in the escape that ARG (alternate reality games) and MMOG (massively multiplayer online games) seem to encourage. In particular, I have written about my concerns regarding the implications and challenges presented by online virtual worlds like SecondLife.

So, how did McGonigal open my mind and shift my thinking towards a more positive understanding of gaming? First, it was helpful to learn the important difference between the labels “alternative reality” vs. “alternate reality.” Alternative reality suggests a different reality, an attempt to escape one’s life and enter a different life. McGonigal argued that it is important that the gaming community labels itself as engaged in alternate reality. She understands gaming as a means to experience the one in the same reality as our everyday life through a unique (alternate) experience. It is not an escape; it is an enhancement. Thus, “alternate” does not mean engaging in a different reality; it means engaging reality in an “alternate” way.

Wired Magazine writer, Earnest Cavalli, did an excellent job of summarizing the premise of McGonigal’s research and development in a February 22, 2008 article:

I Love Bees Designer: ‘Games Are the Ultimate Happiness Engine’

“Reality is broken,” and the task of fixing it falls squarely to game developers, according to Jane McGonigal, an academic and game designer most famous for her work on the I Love Bees Halo promotion.

McGonigal believes that games, after three decades of engaging people on wildly different levels, offer the solution: combine the immediate gratification of games with the drudgery of reality and reality suddenly sucks a lot less.

The end goal of this scenario she has created is to have games exist in almost every facet of reality, from playing with your dog to running down the block.

While the example of MMO components being added to everything one does is presumably an oversimplified example to illustrate her point, the idea of tying games to everything is simultaneously so simple and could be so ridiculously successful, that I’d be surprised if it wasn’t a near term eventuality.

In essence, McGonigal challenged the audience of web/game developers to expand their imaginations beyond entertainment as an end in itself. She believes that we must research gaming to discern the principles and components intrinsic to it that motivates people to devote themselves to it so wholly and with such fulfillment. Why not apply what we learn as game developers to improving the quality of our daily lives? Why can’t we experience an “alternate” way of engaging reality in settings outside the confines of computers, game consoles, and game boards? Our lives could use an infusion of core gaming attributes like healthy competition, immediate affirmation and feedback, failure as learning opportunity, measurable skill acquisition, multiplayer partnership in solving problems and completing tasks, etc.

UK newspaper, The Guardian, covered SXSW, and it published this list from McGonigal’s talk regarding the ways alternate reality game skills might “amplify happiness”:

• Mobbability is the skill of working well in large groups.
• Influency is the ability to be persuasive in large groups.
• Ping quotient is a player’s responsiveness to others.
• Multi-capitalism is a fluency of capitalism, learning to exchange not just financial but social and intellectual capital.
• Cooperation radar is the ability to sense good collaborators.
• Open authorship is skills in creating collaborative projects.
• Emergensight is the ability to deal with complexity and unexpected results.
• Longbroading is being able to think in a strategic, high-level way.
• Protovation is the inclination to innovate in fast, constantly improving cycles.
• Signal/noise management describes the ability to accurately and efficiently filter useful form non-useful information.

As a web designer, my mind was hitting on all synapses as McGonigal spoke. She mentioned a San Francisco based web site called SF0.org. It creates “missions” for San Francisco residents to undertake in the real geographic context of their city. Players maintain profiles on the web site and document the results of their missions. McGonigal herself participates in the SF Zero games. She and her sister learned the Soulja Boy dance from some people on a neighborhood street corner as a result of one mission. Of course, once she mentioned this example, the crowd called for a demonstration. She pulled an attendee to the stage, and together, they performed the Soulja Boy dance in step with the video on YouTube. People are blogging about that more than the content of her keynote.

Anyway, back to the synapses firing in my brain. I was thinking that it would be interesting to create a web site that kept track of philanthropic opportunities in a localized way. You could sign up for an account, and then twitter the site anytime you had down time, and you were “open” to doing a good deed. With a “geotag” function, you could let the site know your exact location, and it could twitter (or email/text/IM) back to you a list of immediate opportunities within a few blocks radius. Hmmmm. As a person interested in helping the Christian Church leverage communications technology to enhance its mission, McGonigal inspires me to investigate the “happiness research” she referenced and expand my field of study to include alternate reality gaming in everyday life. For example, I am intrigued by LifeChurch.tv, and its efforts to plant a church in the virtual community of SecondLife. I spoke with Terry Storch at the GodBit dinner while I was at SXSW, and he reported that the church is indeed reaching people through that medium. He is impressed by the international diversity in its ministry. They are truly engaging with people that have never experienced Christianity or church before.

I hope that Jane McGonigal’s message takes root in the game development community. And as she increases awareness in the culture at large regarding her research, game developers might receive the funding they need to apply gaming principles towards issues and problems in society. Perhaps a game developer will win the Nobel Prize by 2032? What do you think?

Below is a very cool “graphic recording” of McGonigal’s keynote created by Sunni Brown. Brown created these information designs on the fly during every keynote as the speaker presented. It would be cool to learn to take notes that way.

Here is a link to video of McGonigal giving a presentation at ETech 2007. Her lecture at SXSW is not online yet; I’ll post it when it is. All of her research is freely available on her web site — Avant Game. She’s made accessible her slides from the SXSW keynote via Slideshare. Dan Hon’s “Extenuating Circumstances” blog includes his attempt at creating a transcript of McGonigal’s SXSW keynote.