The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.

Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.

The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.

Every game we play activates our brain, and it's the same brain we have in real life as we have in the game.

Any time I consider a new project, I ask myself, is this pushing the state of gaming toward Nobel Prizes? If it's not, then it's not doing anything important enough to spend my time.

You can't play the same game every day for years. New games are key.

There is so much more knowledge than most people realize about how to maximize the benefits of play and minimize the potential harms.