Games for Productivity – Jane McGonigal in London

Jane McGonigal is coming to London! Jane who? The creator of Halo 2 alternate-reality game ilovebees in 2004 and currently the Director of Game Research and Development at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future.

I was at the Power to the Pixel Cross-Media Forum with the London Games Festival earlier this week and McGonigal’s work came up in three separate talks. She’s truly an influential thinker. Her oft-quoted stat is that by the age of 21, people in a tech-driven society will have played 10,000 hours of games – the same amount of time spent in 8 years of American school. If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success you’ll know that 10,000 hours is the magic number distinguishing plebian performers from the real virtuosos of basically every skill under the sun. What skills are we learning from games? How to blaze guns down corridors looking for shiny things, I reckon.

McGonigal hopes to change that by using our leisure time to do good while still keeping things fun. She’ll be speaking about productivity at on 24th October. Watch the TED talk below for a preview, then get your tickets for Jane McGonigal on Productivity at The School of Life:

See you there!