Jane McGonigal is the resident game designer for The Institute for the Future and a games researcher. She was recently named to MIT Technology Review's list of Top Innovators under the age of 35 who are changing the world through technology.

Jane McGonigal is the resident game designer at the Institute for the Future and a games researcher .

As former lead designer and community architect at 42 Entertainment, her work on alternate reality games such as I Love Bees and Last Call Poker has been honored by awards from the International Game Developers Association, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and in the New York Times' Year in Review.

Her experimental research games have been produced and exhibited internationally, most recently at the International Symposium for Electronic Arts (2006), the Los Angeles Museum for Contemporary Art (2005), and the Whitney Museum of Art’s digital artport (2005).

Her published research, which focuses on design for collective intelligence and massively-scaled collaboration, includes recent articles for the 2007 MIT Press collection Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, the Journal of Modern Drama, and the Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology.

McGonigal recently finished her Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California at Berkeley, where her dissertation “This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” explores the intersection of ubiquitous and pervasive computing with experimental game design.

McGonigal can be contacted at jane at cruelgame dot com.

Ian Bogost is a game designer and game researcher. He is Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games, a game studio that designs, builds, and distributes videogames for persuasion, instruction, and activism.

Bogost is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press, 2006), Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press, 2007), co-editor (with Matteo Bittanti) of Ludologica Retro: Vintage Arcade Games 1972-1984 (Costa & Nolan), and author of numerous other books, articles, and presentations on videogames, digital media, literature, and film. Bogost is also co-editor (with Gonzalo Frasca) at Water Cooler Games, the online resource about videogames with an agenda. His games about political and social issues have been exhibited internationally and are frequently featured in the popular press.

Bogost holds a BA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and an MA and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Bogost can be contacted at ian at persuasivegames dot com.