Humanity is migrating to cyberspac e. In the past five years, Americans have doubled the hours they spend online,exceeding their television time and more than tripling the time they spend reading newspapers or magazines.Elias Aboujaoude, a Silicon Valley psychiatrist.finds this alarming. He argues that the Internet is unleashing our worst instincts. It connects you to whatever you want: gambling, overspending, sex with strangers. I t speeds transactions, facilitating impulse purchases and luring you away from the difficulties of real life. It shields you from detection and disapproval, emboldening you to download test answers and term papers. It rewards self-promotion on blogs and Facebook. In short, everything you thought was good about the Internet-information, access, personalization — is bad. Aboujaoude links the Internet to housing crash.eating disorders, sexually transmitted infections, racism,terrorism, child sexual abuse, suicide and murder. The Internet makes us too quarrelsome. It makes us too like-minded. Jane McGonigal, a game designer, thinks that the virtual world isn't a foreign gadget. It's our own evolving creation. She agrees that bad online games can addict people, distract them from reality and leave them empty. But this is our fault , not the In ternet 's . In the rise of multiplayer games, she sees a happier picture of human nature — a thirst for community, a craving for hard work and a love of rules. This, she argues, is the essence of games: rules, a challenge and a shared objective. The trick is to design games that reward good behavior . The Internet is a blessing, not a threat. The point isn't just to enhance virtual reality. It's to fix the real world, too. McGonigal offers several examples. Chore Wars, an altemate-reality game, builds positive attitudes toward housework by rewarding virtual housework. Groundcrew assigns players to help people with transportation, shopping or housekeeping. The premise is that since games motivate us more effectively than real life, making them unselfish and bringing them into the physical world will promote unselfish behavior. But is this motivating power transferable? What draws us to virtual worlds, McGonigal notes, is their "carefully designed pleasures" and "thrilling challenges" customized to our strengths. They're never boring. They make us feel powerful. Reality doesn't work this way. Floors need scrubbing. Garbage needs hauling. This work isn't designed for your pleasure or stimulation. I t just needs to be done. If reality is inherently less attractive than games, then the virtual world won't save the physical world. It will empty it. McGonigal says the game industry wants to help users avoid addiction so that they'll remain functional and keep buying its products. But we've heard that argument before from the tobacco industry. Addiction, as a business model, is too addictive to give up. The Internet isn't heaven. I t isn't hell, either . It's just another new world. Like other worlds, it can be civilized. It will need rules, monitoring and benevolent designers who understand the flaws of its inhabitants. If Aboujaoude is right about our weakness for virtual vice, we'll need all the McGonigals we can get.