Jane McGonigal – How Games Make Life Better

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:49)
My guest this week is Jane McGonigal, who is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games or games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She is the author of Reality is Broken, Like 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.

**Jane McGonigal** (1:22)
Well, I mean, in my spare time, one thing I do do is track the number 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 arcade, but you can play with hundreds of thousands or millions of people at the same time.
We've never had games like that before. I mean, really, I'm interested in the history of gaming and two things that have happened in the last decade or so compared to the thousands of years of human history is that games used to be smaller. You would sit across a table from somebody and two people would play a dice game or a chess game. And games were always competitive in that there was no form of game where all of the players were on the same side.
So even you think about a big sports where you might have 20 people on one team, you are working together and collaborating, but there's always an opponent, a human opponent. And computer games essentially invented the idea of a massively collaborative game where we can all work together to go on a raid or you have now collaborative board games where everybody who's playing wins or everybody loses. And that really shifted the dynamics of what was possible to doing games. And when I started doing my research in 2001, that was actually the year that the field of game studies was formalized as an academic discipline. But most people were studying games as objects. Like you would study, I don't know, a sculpture in a museum. What are the formal properties of it? They were studying it as like a digital.
I mean, I was really one of the only people saying it's the players that we need to study. I want to study the psychology of the players, the sociology of the players. How is it changing? How they relate to each other? What kinds of challenges they tackle in real life? And so I was lucky. I mean, it's always a good idea if you can be first to the scene of anything, whether you're starting a company or starting a research field.
I was kind of lucky that I was the first person out there. It means you spend a few years of people thinking that you're like a little bit crazy, but that's an opportunity because it gives you time to build your case and make what you're thinking might be possible real.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:44)
You mentioned you were designing games at age 10, it sounds like, so very early.

**Jane McGonigal** (3:48)
Well, computer games. My own board games are, if you go visit my parents, they still live in the house we were growing up in.
You can see still masking tape remnants on the basement floor of human-sized board games that we were designing of seven.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:00)
Do you remember what the first, maybe I'll narrow it to digital or video game, the first game that stands out in your memory as like completely capturing your interest and attention?