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Technology Review magazine has announced its annual TR35 list of "Young Innovators Under 35." Joshuas Schachter of Del.icio.us was awarded "Innovator of the Year" and BB pal Jane McGonigal made the list for her supersmart (and fun!) research on game design. (Previous posts about Jane here, here, and here.) Congratulations to all of the TR35 honorees! From the profile of Jane:
LinkMcGonigal argues that alternate-reality games use network technologies--e-mail, websites, Internet chat rooms, text messages, and phone calls--to construct new types of communities whose "collective intelligence" lets them solve problems no member could solve alone. In 2005, she and the I Love Bees team won the Game Developers Choice Awards' Innovation Award and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences' Webby Award.
McGonigal has continued working with 42 Entertainment. In 2005 she developed Tombstone Hold 'Em, part of a 2005 promotion for Activision's game Gun; crowds congregated in historic cemeteries to play poker using tombstones instead of cards. Such novel uses of public spaces are another way she engages players. Her own work as a game designer is fed by watching players interpret the missions she designs: "They always think of far more interesting things than anything I could imagine."