Imagine a world where every chal­lenge is a quest — where the harder a task is, the more people want to do it. Where people take plea­sure in fail­ing and come back invig­o­rated every time they fall. Where they com­mu­ni­cate spon­ta­neously with their col­lab­o­ra­tors to pool their knowl­edge towards shared solu­tions. It turns out that world already exists. And if you draw on its secrets, you can trans­form your busi­ness: that cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion, that effort­less grasp of new tech­nol­ogy, that very 21^st-century con­nec­tiv­ity and that power to solve com­plex prob­lems can all be yours. Your guide to that world is Jane McGonigal. And that world? It’s the world of…gamers.

Gamers?

In her engag­ing, forward-thinking book Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal makes the case that the gamer spirit — an atti­tude of fun, ded­i­cated, col­lec­tive problem-solving — is our great­est asset as we face the social, economic, and envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems of the 21^st century.

She argues that game design­ers are effec­tively hap­pi­ness engi­neers, experts in making dif­fi­cult tasks engag­ing, and that we should draw on their smarts as we frame the chal­lenges of our time. Jane her­self is a spe­cial­ist in this field, a designer of alter­nate real­ity games, where a real-life activ­ity is re-framed as a game. The activ­ity could be as mun­dane as house­hold chores or as epic as sur­viv­ing peak oil or estab­lish­ing local sus­tain­able busi­nesses, the sub­jects of two of Jane’s own games: what­ever the chal­lenge, we can face it more boldly if we bring to it a game­ful state of mind. But as Jane explains, in her quirky, spir­ited way, all of this is more than just a ques­tion of re-framing. It’s about bring­ing back to con­tem­po­rary life the kind of hero­ism, epic pur­pose, and com­mu­nal striv­ing that so many of us strug­gle to find in our lives. With Jane’s help, you can under­stand how to chan­nel that drive to revi­tal­ize your com­pany — and fill our world with epic wins.