Much has been written about games as “fun” or “motivating”. At the same time, people keep doing studies showing that “games” are not better in school for learning than traditional approaches, where these “games” are usually poor pieces of software competing to do what some of our schools already do well: dumb students down. No one needs to test whether a good game leads to learning, since you can’t finish such a game without having mastered it. The same thing would be true of any deep curriculum, game-based or not. In this talk, I will argue that games have the potential to produce a “gamer mindset” and will argue that this mindset is crucial in the modern world. So far, few “serious games” have yet been built to recruit this mindset as well as some good commercial games. Further, the learning effects, outside of entertainment, of such games have barely, if ever, been tested.