Jane McGonigal

Helplessness isn’t learned — it’s an instinctual response that can be overcome.

People naturally mimic each other’s body language, so when you notice it happening to you, it may be a sign that you are personally or professionally compatible with the other person.

Most people are familiar with the technique of taking deep inhalations to relax themselves, but one breathing technique is more effective at returning your body to a naturally calm and connected state.

Make personal connections more meaningful with people you already know and care about, and deepen your relationship with others who you’re just getting to know.

Here’s a simple mind hack: If you’ve got a craving, let Tetris satiate it.

Every time that you make a prediction you get a little bomb of dopamine in the reward pathways of your brain. That dopamine helps you pay closer attention, to process information more effectively, and to be more engaged with what’s going.

In this lesson excerpt from Big Think+, 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!

Why are video gamers so obsessed? Because playing gives people a sense of purpose, and winning them makes them feel heroic. “There’s this kind of transfer of our confidence, of our creativity, of our ambition” from game-playing “to our real lives” says game designer Jane McGonigal. And there are organizational benefits as well: 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 that involves a cooperative mission. In this lesson from Big Think+, 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 argues that games are not a waste of time. In fact, she argues, “we need to look at what games are doing for gamers, the skills that we’re […]

There’s definitely a misperception that women and girls don’t play games. In fact, 40 percent of gamers are women, and 94 percent of girls under the age of 18 play […]

If we all became gamers, there would be more “epic wins” in the real world, says video game designer Jane McGonigal during her 2010 TED talk.