Be happy. Play games.

That’s the message from game designer and theorist Jane McGonigal, who insists video games are anything by wasteful time and energy, and can instead can positively impact people and a real world found wanting.

“I’m not contributing to the GDP, but I’m contributing to my happiness.”

There’s something subversive about that, McGonigal told a capacity audience at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Equally subversive is the her theory that, compared to games, reality feels broken.

So playing games can help people be happier and shape their real worlds for the better of all.

What’s more, playing games with others is better than playing them alone, and playing face-to-face is better than playing with them online.

To promote good gaming, McGonigal recently launched Gameful.org, a social website for game developers and others who want to change the world through gaming.

And that puts MMO game developers especially into the realm of therapists with altruistic real world gaming that helps people do good deeds.

“If you know what your strengths are for real life, MMOs help us identify us with a particular way we can be of service, and when the opportunity arises, we take advantage of that,” McGonigal, in Toronto to promote her latest book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,  told the Rotman audience.

MMO games can also help build community and corporate culture, she argued.

An example: employees at Zappos, an online shoe and clothing retailer, are obliged to start each work day at computer login by playing The Face Game, where the photo of an unidentified fellow employee is displayed, and a user is challenged to name that employee, their job and duties.

“That gets people away from silos (at Zappos). Employees are fairly addicted to this game. You can see maps to well known people in the company.

And the game promotes the sense of knowing who people are in the company, and what they do,” McGonigal explained.

“They feel like they get positive results from the game,” she added.