In 2010, she co-designed and led Evoke, a future-simulation game for the World Bank that was pitched as a 10-week “crash course in saving the world.” It attracted more than 19,000 players in 150-plus countries. She asked them to envision the year 2020 and consider what they’d do to help themselves and others amid compounding crises—raging wildfires, the collapse of a power grid due to severe weather and aging infrastructure, the rise of a group called Citizen X that spread disinformation and conspiracy theories online, and a global respiratory pandemic.

In early 2020, as these story lines were playing out in all-too-real life, McGonigal began hearing from people who had participated in her simulations. “I’m not freaking out,” one person wrote to her at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I already worked through the panic and anxiety when we imagined it 10 years ago.”

In her latest book, Imaginable (Spiegel and Grau, 2022), McGonigal lays out the tools people can use to “unstick” our minds and consider the “unthinkable,” balance our hopes and fears about the future; practice “hard empathy” to see the world from someone else’s point of view, and envision ourselves in various scenarios—some harrowing, some hopeful—in 2033.

The kind of “mental time travel” she espouses is not meant to be abstract. If it’s going to rain, it’s about “vividly imagining yourself in the rain, trying to pre-feel the rain on your skin.”

“The more vividly we imagine the worst-case scenario,” she writes, “the more motivated we feel to try to prevent it.”

McGonigal’s approach calls to mind St. Ignatius, the 16th-century founder of the Jesuits, who encouraged his companions to practice imaginative prayer—to put themselves in the Gospel stories, activating all their senses, as a means of feeling God’s presence in their lives and making choices about the future.

“A social simulation,” she writes, “is a springboard to making a better world.”

It’s a message McGonigal has been sharing for years, ever since she earned a B.A. in English from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 1999 and a Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. Citing research in cognitive and behavioral science, and drawing on her own experience as a game designer and futurist, in several books, including Reality Is Broken (Penguin, 2011), she has made a compelling case that games can be a platform for people to improve their lives and solve real-world problems.

For McGonigal, prognostication isn’t the point of imagining the future; it’s about stretching “our collective imagination, so we are more flexible, adaptable, agile, and resilient when the ‘unthinkable’ happens.” And it’s about developing a sense of “urgent optimism”—an ability to think “creatively and confidently right now about the things you could make, the solutions you could invent, the communities you could help.”

It’s an approach that Andrew Dana Hudson, FCLC ’09, shares. In his debut novel, Our Shared Storm (Fordham University Press, 2022), he imagines five possible climate futures for the world based on decisions we make between now and 2054, when the novel is set.

McGonigal’s message also calls to mind something Fordham’s new president, Tania Tetlow, has said about a Fordham Jesuit education being right for this moment, “when young people are passionate about wanting to question assumptions and fix systems.”

In 2009, a decade after graduating from Fordham, McGonigal told Fordham Magazine that “the Jesuit idea of being in service has stayed with me. I see the games I create as helping to create a better community.”

It’s an inspiring message—and her optimism is not just urgent, it’s necessary, generous, and contagious.

Specifically, it was a “role-playing recovery game,” and it changed her life within a matter of days, said McGonigal,  FCLC ’99, one of today’s foremost creators of alternate reality games, in a talk posted online this week.

Her talk was posted on the website of TED, a self-described “nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading,” which hosts conferences featuring talks by notable people in varied fields. TED stands for technology, entertainment, and design, the group’s original focus.

For years, McGonigal has been spreading the word about the power of games to bring players’ creativity, optimism and determination to bear on solving tough problems. She made her name in the gaming field after graduating from Fordham with a degree in English and earning a doctorate in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of the bestselling book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2010).

Her TED talk, delivered last month at the group’s conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, was titled “The game that can give you 10 extra years of life,” in reference to life-extending activities that she studied following her injury.

Two years ago, a concussion left her in a fog of headaches, nausea, vertigo, and memory loss. To cope, she had to avoid all sorts of mental activity—reading, writing, playing games, writing e-mails, working.

As often happens in cases of traumatic brain injury, she said, she grew suicidal.

“My brain started telling me, ‘Jane, you want to die,’” she said. “These voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to legitimately fear for my life.”

She responded by enlisting her sister and husband in a role-playing game, “Jane the Concussion Slayer,” organized around the things that triggered her symptoms and activities that alleviated them. While her symptoms persisted for more than a year, she said, “that fog of depression and anxiety went away” within a few days.

“It just vanished,” she said. “It felt like a miracle.”

The experience led her to design on online game, SuperBetter, that she said has helped people face a variety of conditions—such as cancer, depression and chronic pain—with more bravery and strength.

She walked the audience members through some of the game’s exercises that build physical, mental, emotional and social resilience, citing research showing that those who regularly build these strengths can add 10 years to their lives.

After building these four capacities, “you will have built up the strength and resilience to live a life truer to your dreams” and reach the end of life with fewer regrets, she said.

— Chris Gosier

The Berkeley Ph.D. and game designer knows something about the power of play, and she says “There’s a misconception that people play video games to relax. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

See Jane McGonigal: The power of play, and her FORDHAM Magazine profile, “Jane McGonigal: Real Gamer” (downloadable PDF).