The alternative (ideas) manager

Future forecaster Jane McGonigal wants to transform tomorrow’s businesses into an endless, integrated board game in order to boost creativity and promote team spirit.

Jane McGonigal has a vision: By 2035 at the latest, a game designer will be nominated for a Nobel prize. Though, laughing, the 32-year-old admits, “You have to take games very seriously to be able to imagine that.” And that is just what an increasing number of companies are doing: as they adopt McGonigal’s idea of finding solutions for a better reality through the systematic mechanics of play. Since 2004, a dozen Global Fortune 500 companies alone have asked the researcher at the Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley to develop a game tailored to their needs, enabling them to address their real-world problems within the scope of game workshops spanning several days.

Games as a platform for innovation

Would you like to improve your personal network or strengthen collaboration? Do you want to forge new contacts, or need external creative input? Clients as diverse as Microsoft, Intel, McDonald’s and the American Heart Association are taken by McGonigal, the energetic teacher’s daughter originally from Pennsylvania, and her company Avantgame. She impresses with a large dose of self-confidence – “We’re not trying to predict the future, we’re making the future” – and the humorous twinkle in her eye, backed by great persuasiveness. She asks: “Have you ever considered that integrated game systems are perhaps the most innovative platform for effective mass collaboration?” And she lends weight to her invitation to view the world from a different perspective by citing heavy-weight names. It’s a clever approach. “Did you know that it was Albert Einstein who said ‘games are the most elevated form of investigation? And don’t you agree with Stanford researcher Nick Yee who believes “Only through games can you train people to work harder, to push themselves beyond their usual boundaries – and to enjoy the experience.”

Treading a fine line between work and play

Games have played a pivotal role in McGonigal’s life since early childhood: at the age of ten, she and her identical twin sister programmed their first computer game on a Commodore 65. Since then, as a university graduate with her own company, she’s been perfecting the balance between consumer electronics and reality. She created the game I Love Bees for Microsoft and The Lost Ring for McDonald’s – a six-month treasure hunt in nine languages and across 100 countries timed to coincide with the Beijing Olympics. Her online simulation Superstruct brought employees from Proctor & Gamble, National Semiconductor, Kraft and Electronic Arts together (virtually, of course) to join thousands of participants from all over the world in saving the planet in 2019 from fictitious problems, such as disease, food shortages and political unrest.

Part two of article