Engage Your Team Through Gaming, with Jane McGonigal

In this lesson excerpt from Big Think Edge, video game designer Jane McGonigal walks you through the ways in which gaming can lead to positive outcomes in the workplace. By the end of it, you may just want to integrate gaming into your break space design or your next corporate retreat!

 Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal, PhD, is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future and the author of The New York Times bestseller Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. McGonigal's newest book is titled SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient--Powered by the Science of Games. Her work has been featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times and on MTV, CNN, and NPR. She has been called one of the top ten innovators to watch (BusinessWeek), one of the one hundred most creative people in business (Fast Company), and one of the fifty most important people in the gaming industry (Game Developers Magazine). Her TED talks on games have been viewed more than ten million times.

11 March, 2015

Research shows that gaming can have positive social, emotional and psychological benefits.

Jane McGonigal: There’s been some fascinating research to suggest that when we play games and we tap into positive emotions like curiosity and optimism and creativity, and even love, that these emotions actually stay with us for up to 24 hours after we finish playing the game. So studies have shown that we’re more likely to cooperate with someone in our real lives after we’ve played a social game with them where we’re doing some kind of cooperative mission. Or we’re more likely to set an ambitious goal for ourselves after we’ve succeeded in a game. We’ll speak up more for ourselves. We’ll even flirt with more attractive strangers. So there’s this kind of transfer of our confidence, of our creativity, of our ambition to our real lives.

 

In this lesson excerpt from Big Think Edge, video game designer Jane McGonigal walks you through the ways in which gaming can lead to positive outcomes in the workplace. By the end of it, you may just want to integrate gaming into your break space design or your next corporate retreat!

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