Jane McGonigal designs alternate reality games intended to “improve real lives or solve real problems.” She is the author of the best-selling book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (2011) and serves as creative director for the group Social Chocolate and director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future. This article first appeared in the Huffington Post in February 2011. In this essay, McGonigal offers a modest and perhaps counterintuitive proposal about gaming.