On a warm evening in 2014, Attila Szantner, a Hungarian Web entrepreneur, and his friend Bernard Revaz, a Swiss physics researcher, sat on a balcony in Geneva and discussed the perils of video games. The medium's greatest threat, they concluded, is not that it turns people into vicious killers, or that it dulls their communication skills, or that it sunders their minds from reality. No, the problem is that, in providing players with a sense of accomplishment, games may distract our species from genuine achievement. Who hasn't felt a house-proud throb of satisfaction at clearing a clutter of Tetris blocks or landing a rocket ship on the moon after centuries of effort in Civilization? Like crosswords and pornography, these activities are both alluring and vacuous: they do little to meet life's challenges on this side of the screen. But it occurred to Szantner and Revaz that the tremendous amount of time and energy that people put into games could be co-opted in the name of human progress.