When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.

It's a bit counter-intuitive to think about the future in terms of the past. But...I've learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight. Technologies, cultures, and climates may change, but our basic human needs and desires - to survive, to care for our families, and to lead happy, purposeful lives - remain the same.

During this kind of highly structured, self-motivated hard work, Csikszentmihalyi wrote, we regularly achieve the greatest form of happiness available to human beings: intense, optimistic engagement with the world around us. We feel fully alive, full of potential and purpose--in other words, we are completely activated as human beings.

There are people who are very dismissive of games and gamers.

If you make it a game, gamers will play it no matter what your motivation is in making it.

Game developers know that people have more fun when they're in large groups. They feel more fired up when the challenges are more epic.

Every game designer should make one explicitly world-changing game. Lawyers do pro bono work, why can't we?

I want to see a game designer nominated for a Nobel Prize.

Game design isn’t just a technological craft. It’s a twenty-first-century way of thinking and leading.