Jane McGonigal Life Quotations

For most people, an hour a day playing our favorite games will power up our ability to engage whole-heartedly with difficult challenges, strengthen our relationships with the people we care about most - while still letting us notice when it's time to stop playing in virtual worlds and bring our gamer strengths back to real life.

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.

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.

I don't want a gamer to feel like they have to commit their whole life to changing the world.

Surveys of thousands of gamers have shown that they're more likely to play real music if they play a music videogame. So it's an interesting relationship where the games aren't replacing something we do in real life, they're serving as a springboard to a goal we might have in real life, like learning to play an instrument.