Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guest this week is Jane McGonigal, who is a world-renowned designer of alternative reality games, or games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She's the author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World; and is the inventor and co-founder of SuperBetter, a game that has helped nearly a million players tackle real life health challenges like depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury. Our conversation is about how to design useful games, how games affect us and our kids, and what the future might hold. Please enjoy.
Gaming and Flow
Jane
Well, I mean, in my spare time, one thing I do is track the numbers of gamers globally. So we're at 2.6 billion people now, who regularly play games on connected devices. Which is really crucial, because the tipping point in gaming culture, really, was when games started to be connected to the internet and gamers could connect to each other. And it really increased the number of games you can play, how many people can you play with; not just one person in your living room or a few people at an arcade, but you can play with hundreds of thousands or millions of people at the same time. We'd never had games like that before. I mean, I'm really interested in the history of gaming.