All of her life, Jane McGonigal has been interested in games. At the tender age of ten, she programmed her first game on a Commodore 64. In the years since, she’s designed award winning alternate reality games and massively multiplayer online games — some of which celebrate the fun of dancing, others that deal with human extinction.

But McGonigal doesn’t simply see games as a career or a diversion. She thinks they can save the world.

McGonigal is the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future and the author of a new book “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How They Can Change the World.”