Annyira bírom ezt a csajt!!! Még Amerikában is csak egy van belőle...
Game Designer Jane McGonigal
Itt jönnek a kedvenc részeim (a gyerekkoráról):
Since childhood, McGonigal has sought out these types of self-motivating challenges, like when she wrote a full-length young-adult novel the summer before ninth grade. But her schoolteacher parents, early Internet adopters who doled out allowances based on the number of books read, actively pushed their daughters in a way that “was both good and stressful,” says Jane’s identical twin, Kelly McGonigal, who teaches positive psychology at Stanford University and who half jokingly calls their mother “the original tiger mom.… She never treated us like we were gifted. It was like, ‘You have to work hard all the time.’ ”
“We believed that you follow their interests, and tried to provide as much opportunity as we could,” says Judith McGonigal, on the phone from her home in Moorestown, New Jersey, where Jane and Kelly grew up. “Wherever their creativity led, we followed.”
McGonigal’s ARGs are incredibly strategic and detailed and often encompass intricate narratives; they take place over a specific period of time—from one night to a few months—and each is carefully designed to provoke certain emotions in the players. (A sneaky side effect of our thumb-war collective, McGonigal told us, was to feel goodwill toward our seatmates, thanks to the release of the “bonding chemical” oxytocin into our bloodstreams, triggered if a touch lasts more than six seconds.)
Jane was the natural gamer of the duo, with a competitive nature and a knack for understanding game structure. She spent endless hours on the family’s Commodore 64—unlike most kids then, she wasn’t interested in Nintendo or Sega, preferring instead the lesser-known mystery and problem-solving “text adventure” games of the era—and both sisters mention a lengthy period when the card game Spit reigned over the neighborhood. “People would sit in a circle and watch Jane play,” always emerging the victor, Kelly says.
Jane created her own games too: The basement of their parents’ home still has the masking-tape markers of a life-size board game she dreamed up around fourth grade, called Prom Night, and she recalls making her high-school boyfriend play a game she created around major milestones in their relationship, “like, ‘Here’s our first date,’ ” she says. She’s forgotten the details, except that it involved dice: “I just remember my sister saying, ‘I can’t believe you convinced him to sit and play this game with you.’ ” (That’s a hallmark of a “Jane game,” Kelly adds. “She gets people to do really strange things—and they feel like that was the coolest thing in the world.”) Even back then, Jane says, “I liked organizing experiences for people.… I liked that you could take a bunch of people and they’d have this experience together and get excited. Maybe it’s because I was geeky, but I liked that people who wouldn’t ordinarily talk or be nice to each another would be on the same team.”
Tiger parenting has its advantages: Jane graduated first in her class at Fordham University; Kelly was summa cum laude at Boston University. But Jane’s first year in the real world—editing at a dot-com in New York, ruling out law school and publishing—left her feeling a little lost. One day Kelly asked her, “As a child, what did you do that you loved?”
“Making up games and giving motivational speeches,” Jane answered. “But that’s not a career! Who does that?”
