Top 70 Jane McGonigal Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Reality is broken. Game designers can fix it.”

— Jane McGonigal

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

— Jane McGonigal

3. “Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible and that it’s always worth trying and trying now.”

— Jane McGonigal

4. “Scientists have demonstrated that dramatic, positive changes can occur in our lives as a direct result of facing an extreme challenge – whether it’s coping with a serious illness, daring to quit smoking, or dealing with depression. Researchers call this ‘post-traumatic growth.’”

— Jane McGonigal

5. “Game developers know that people have more fun when they’re in large groups. They feel more fired up when the challenges are more epic.”

— Jane McGonigal

6. “When we play a game, we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination, more optimism, and we’re more likely to reach out to others for help.”

— Jane McGonigal

7. “If you make it a game, gamers will play it no matter what your motivation is in making it.”

— Jane McGonigal

8. “Every game we play activates our brain, and it’s the same brain we have in real life as we have in the game.”

— Jane McGonigal

9. “What’s really amazing about games is how they change our emotional response to challenges.”

— Jane McGonigal

10. “Games are unnecessary obstacles we volunteer to tackle.”

— Jane McGonigal

Featured in: Volunteer Quotes

11. “Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.”

— Jane McGonigal

12. “Compared with games, reality is disconnected.”

— Jane McGonigal

13. “When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.”

— Jane McGonigal

14. “When we’re in game worlds, we become the best version of ourselves, the most likely to help at a moment’s notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again.”

— Jane McGonigal

15. “I want to see a game designer nominated for a Nobel Prize.”

— Jane McGonigal

16. “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”

— Jane McGonigal

17. “We can boost our immune systems by strengthening our social networks and decreasing stress.”

— Jane McGonigal

18. “When we play games, our brains respond differently to stress and obstacles. We’re better able to control our attention and ignore distractions.”

— Jane McGonigal

19. “Games that make you feel good about yourself are good games to be playing.”

— Jane McGonigal

20. “I’m not a fan of simulations. Where, ‘Oh, we’ll go play a simulation of world peace and figure out how to make peace’ and then somehow magically that will get translated into the real world. No, that’s not the kind of games that I make.”

— Jane McGonigal

21. “I didn’t accomplish what I set out to do, but I realized I had set out to do the wrong things.”

— Jane McGonigal

22. “My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games.”

— Jane McGonigal

23. “Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work.”

— Jane McGonigal

24. “The idea of the ‘lone gamer’ is really not true anymore. Up to 65 percent of gaming now is social, played either online or in the same room with people we know in real life.”

— Jane McGonigal

25. “You can’t play the same game every day for years. New games are key.”

— Jane McGonigal

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

— Jane McGonigal

27. “The single biggest misconception about games is that they’re an escapist waste of time.”

— Jane McGonigal

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

— Jane McGonigal

29. “Games are providing rewards that reality is not.”

— Jane McGonigal

30. “I see a future in which games once again are explicitly designed to improve quality of life, to prevent suffering, and to create real, widespread happiness.”

— Jane McGonigal

31. “We’ve been playing games since humanity had civilization – there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It’s so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases.”

— Jane McGonigal

32. “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.”

— Jane McGonigal

33. “We have to accept as a society that games are not escapist. They really do change us.”

— Jane McGonigal

34. “There are people who are very dismissive of games and gamers.”

— Jane McGonigal

35. “Any time I consider a new project, I ask myself, is this pushing the state of gaming toward Nobel Prizes? If it’s not, then it’s not doing anything important enough to spend my time.”

— Jane McGonigal

36. “T. S. Eliot famously wrote, “If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”

— Jane McGonigal

37. “A traumatic event doesn’t doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives.”

— Jane McGonigal

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

— Jane McGonigal

39. “Game developers know better than anyone else how to inspire extreme effort and reward hard work. They know how to facilitate cooperation and collaboration at previously unimaginable scales. And they are continuously innovating new ways to motivate players to stick with harder challenges, for longer, and in much bigger groups. These crucial twenty-first-century skills can help all of us find new ways to make a deep and lasting impact on the world around us.”

— Jane McGonigal

40. “Avatars are a way to express our true selves, our most heroic, idealized version of who we might become.”

— Jane McGonigal

41. “Things like depression and obesity are global challenges.”

— Jane McGonigal

42. “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.”

— Jane McGonigal

43. “There is so much more knowledge than most people realize about how to maximize the benefits of play and minimize the potential harms.”

— Jane McGonigal

44. “The more we consume, acquire, and elevate our status, the harder it is to stay happy.”

— Jane McGonigal

45. “Even if you never increase your physical or social resilience, seeking out more positive emotions every day alone can add a full decade to your life.”

— Jane McGonigal

46. “When we know our strengths, we’re more likely to use them.”

— Jane McGonigal

47. “Positive psychologists call this process “hedonic adaptation,” and it’s one of the biggest hindrances to long-term life satisfaction.16 The more we consume, acquire, and elevate our status, the harder it is to stay happy. Whether it’s money, grades, promotions, popularity, attention, or just plain material things we want, scientists agree: seeking out external rewards is a sure path to sabotaging our own happiness.”

— Jane McGonigal

48. “Gamers don’t want to game the system. Gamers want to play the game. They want to explore and learn and improve. They’re volunteering for unnecessary hard work – and they genuinely care about the outcome of their effort.”

— Jane McGonigal

49. “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.”

— Jane McGonigal

50. “My mom is a public school teacher and works with third grade students.”

— Jane McGonigal