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Ever since the Industrial Revolution began rapidly mechanizing labor and created leisure time on a societal scale, people have sought ways to fill their free time—ways to spend society's" cognitive surplus"[Shirky 2010]. This surfeit of human thought and effort currently amounts to close to a trillion hours a year. For decades, people have spent much of this surplus consuming mass-produced entertainment—primarily, watching television. However, in recent years people are increasingly spending their free time on games and other forms of interactive entertainment. Games are sometimes taken to task for being socially problematic—many see games, especially modern computer games, as a waste of time at best and a cause of anti-social and even violent behavior at worst. Nevertheless, games offer significant potential to redirect the cognitive surplus in ways that contribute to society. As a popular form of …