Okay, I'm a day late to the party!  Couldn't be helped.  Anyway, I decided to go with Jane McGonigal for my Ada Lovelace Day post.  This was a surprisingly difficult choice.  

At first I wanted to pick a historical example, to show that women have been instrumental in science learning since the very beginning (they have been, you know).  But then I decided it would look like I couldn't find any contemporary examples, or that they were somehow less worthy than a woman in ancient Greece.

Then I wanted to go with a really technical choice, a woman who had started off in CS back in the early fusty old days when getting a CS degree was a very quirky and irrelevant degree, something like a degree in Theater would be today.  Because there are a lot of highly technical women who have been working the super hard problems ever since computer science was a thing.  

But I'll be honest with you, as I researched which women did what, I couldn't make sense of any of it.  These women are doing work that is so far over my head, all I can do is say "Whoa" like a bad Keanu Reeves impersonation.

And then I thought about Jane McGonigal.  

Despite not having a strong background in computer-y science-y things, McGonigal has become incredibly influential in the field of computer game design, game theory, and futurism.  I remembered McGonigal's name from the days of the "I Love Bees" real life MMORPG/alternate reality game (ARG) which presaged the launch of Halo 2.

Before I knew that McGonigal had been involved in I Love Bees, I had noted that the ARG's storyline involved a lot of female characters.  The artificial intelligence which was supposedly communicating with players was named Melissa, and the owner of the site (ilovebees.com) that was hacked by Melissa was also a woman.  And more to the point, these weren't princesses crying out from the distant tower to be rescued, Rapunzel-style.  They were agents of their own destiny.

I Love Bees was ground-breaking at the time, and it still stands as the best example of the form.  And as one of the few examples of "real" female characters in gaming.  

McGonigal has recently published a TED talk where she discusses how the lessons she has learned about gaming apply to real life.  It's filled with those things that seem so obvious once someone's said them, like the fact that the collective brain power behind the World of Warcraft user base could easily be shifted slightly in intent to save the world.  Or "We feel that we're not as good in reality as we are in games."  Or "there's no unemployment in World of Warcraft - there's always something specific and important to be done."

In the end, I chose McGonigal not just because she has helped craft interesting, immersive gaming experiences.  But also because she is taking the lessons she learned during that process, and is working on applying them to real life - to solving real problems in the real world; or rather, to creating the tools to let us do that ourselves.  Is there any greater goal?