Jane McGonigal, director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future, had my number. She opened her keynote address by acknowledging that many people in the audience might have been wondering what gaming had to do with city or county management... then she set out to school us by starting with a definition of a game master. A game master is not the person who designs the game or even plays the game, but the one who organizes the players and the community. When she asked if there were any game masters in the audience, no hands went up. She fell short of her goal of converting all of us to becoming future game masters, but succeeded in winning over many before she was done.

She smoothly segued from the opening statistic that 3 billion hours are spent every week (worldwide) playing online video games (10 million in my hometown of Chicago) to ask "what if we could tap into even 1% of that time to tackle real-world problems?" She shared the vision from her forthcoming book "Reality is Broken" and talked about how gaming can encourage "urgent optimism," "social fabric", "blissful production" and "epic meaning."

For non-gamers like myself, it was hard to really picture how you move from the virtual world to the real world until she showed us two "pro-social" games she had developed: World Without Oil and Evoke. Both games involved thousands of people in playing a game, but also living the game in real life and documenting their experiences online. I would encourage people to check them out for themselves, but I was impressed by the level of engagement of the players and outcomes like 32 companies being started about 10 weeks of playing Evoke, a game geared to inspiring (and teaching) social entrepreneurship. Find her slides at http://www.slideshare.net/avantgame/creating-cityscale-collaboration-with-games. Game on!