131 Quotes by Jane McGonigal

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.

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.

I ran through most of college and ran through most of grad school. When I was writing my dissertation for my Ph.D., it was literally the only hour of the day that I wasn't working. It was nine months of torture, but I made sure I got out to run.

The single biggest misconception about games is that they're an escapist waste of time.

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

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

We are moving towards a new form of collective intelligence.

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.