Games are such a powerful intervention in health and wellness.

The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression.

We have to accept as a society that games are not escapist. They really do change us.

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

When we're in game worlds, I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves: the most likely to help at a moment's notice. The most likely to stick with a problem as long as it takes. To get up after failure and try again.

What's really amazing about games is how they change our emotional response to challenges.

Evidence shows that having even weak social connections in a stressful situation is really good for your health and your ability to handle that situation.

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

When we're in game worlds, I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves -- the most likely to help at a moment's notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again.

Games are work. There are economies popping up in games now because people value them.

I'm not a fan of simulations. Where, 'Oh, we'll go play a simulation of world peace and figure out how to make peace' and then somehow magically that will get translated into the real world. No, that's not the kind of games that I make.

We can boost our immune systems by strengthening our social networks and decreasing stress.

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

A traumatic event doesn't doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives.

My favorite part of running is the thinking time.

A game is an opportunity to focus our energy, with relentless optimism, at something we're good at (or getting better at) and enjoy. In other words, gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression.

You need to develop mental habits that allow you to activate the same brain patterns we activate during gameplay.

I ran through most of college and ran through most of grad school. When I was writing my dissertation for my Ph.D., it was literally the only hour of the day that I wasn't working. It was nine months of torture, but I made sure I got out to run.

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.

The more we consume, acquire, and elevate our status, the harder it is to stay happy.