Quotes from Jane McGonigal

Clinically speaking, depression is a pessimistic sense of your own capabilities, and despondent lack of energy.

There is no problem that doesn't have some underlying need for more optimism, stamina, resilience and collaboration. And games are, I believe, the best platform we have for providing that.

I don't do 'gamification,' and I'm not prepared to stand up and say, 'I think it works.'

Things like depression and obesity are global challenges.

Game designers are obsessed with emotion. How do we create the emotions that we want gamers to feel, and how can we really make it this intense, emotional experience?

Although I'm perceived as very optimistic and upbeat, it comes out of being the opposite of that - feeling isolated or lonely, looking for meaning and the kinds of things that ease that suffering in life, and finding them in large-scale social interaction, like theater and games.

Reality is broken and we need to make it work more like a game.

A dramatic decrease in oil availability is not at all far-fetched.

When parents or gamers ask me, 'What's the best game to play?' I say that playing face-to-face is more beneficial than playing online.

Every game designer should make one explicitly world-changing game. Lawyers do pro bono work, why can't we?

Games are work. There are economies popping up in games now because people value them.

It seems like what happens when we play games is that we go into a psychological state called eustress, or positive stress. It's basically the same as negative stress in the sense that we get our adrenaline up, you know, our breathing rate quickens, our pulse quickens.

When my life is stressful, my favorite game is called 'Pop It,' where you pop balloons and prizes fall out. It's a five-minute game that focuses my mind and gives me extra attention when I'm stressed.

'Superbetter' looks more like a social media platform or a social network than a typical video game. You know, there aren't any 3-d spaces to explore. You don't have this avatar that you're building up. It's more about thinking like a gamer.

It may have once been true that computer games encouraged us to interact more with machines than with each other. But if you still think of gamers as loners, then you're not playing games.

Game design isn't just a technological craft. It's a twenty-first-century way of thinking and leading.

I worry a lot about people using games just for marketing, to get people to buy more stuff, which I think would be the worst possible use.

What's really amazing about games is how they change our emotional response to challenges