Playing games. . . is serious business!
Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 12:00PM In October of last year I was chosen to be a presenter at the 2009 Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit organized by Innovation Philadelphia. I was amped, as I had the opportunity to discuss the goals and vision of our company with a national and international audience.
As I perused through the conference site to see who else would be presenting, I saw that Jane McGonigal would be speaking as a plenary speaker. At the time I didn't know who she was but with a little research I discovered that she was named "Top 35 innovators changing the world through technology" in the MIT Review as well as being named "Top 100 Creative People in Business" by Fast Company in 2009, in addition to slew of other accolades. I was definitely excited by the opportunity to hang out and chat with her and learn more about her work. Unfortunately she became sick a few days before the event and had to conduct her presentation via skype from her home in San Francisco (which actually ended up being very cool).
Ever since then I have made it a point to stay abreast of her work in game design and also to tune into conversations around games and business. So in my last post Lee Clow and Alex Bogusky were talking about the intersection of games, storytelling and brands and it made me immediately think about Jane's work.
About a month back I saw that she unveiled at this year's TED conference her most recent gaming effort: Evoke.
Evoke is a 10 week crash course in changing the world (talk about ambitious). The goal of the social network game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.
I love what she is involved with. Definitely check out more of her work.
Enjoy the video!
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