Blurring boundaries, I've had that problem all my life. You know the Sesame Street game: "which of these three things doesn't belong?" Right, that's hard work;-) I have a hunch this You Tube video www.youtube.com/watch about a serious game called Peacemaker -- Israel-Palestine peace-- belongs in the discussion in this tribe.

Clay Shirky's piece which Phil links to is so fascinating because he talks about A Pattern Language en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language a subject I'd only paid attention to in the area of architecture, but long had some thought it could be used in other areas. Little as I know of computers and programming, I hadn't understood its place in that domain.

Shirky writes: "Social software is the experimental wing of political philosophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing."
That seems to go well with Seun's point. Meanwhile I'm still digesting observations Phil made over at his blog Platform Wars recently:

"[M]oney and IP are rival protocols in rival networks which are means to the same end : that of articulating human labour to create more wealth for humanity. Money isn't wealth, it's just a kind of signal which can be used to help identify good ideas and channel more resources to them."

platformwars.blogspot.com/2006/...r.html

platformwars.blogspot.com/2006/...d.html

Social Software as "experiment" may be like fields of genetically-altered crops which end up inserting the altered genes into the surrounding crops. My hunch is that as alternative currencies proliferate the same sorts of phenomena will happen. Cash in your "virtual cash" for a more widely exchanged money, well as Scribe's link shows it's already happening.

I'm so old, I missed computer games and even Dungeons and Dragons completely. Obviously war games and game theory is nothing new, but the Peacemaker game strikes me as something new if and when it and games like it enter the social software arena.

Phil has also been writing about his enthusiasm for prediction markets. I've posted about business enthusiasm alt-money.tribe.net/thread/0...5741704af and the more recent Business Week feature on them www.businessweek.com/technol...dex.html (the link still seems to be working).

Like I say, I have a tendency to blur boundaries. Phil may indeed be right about the platform rivalry, and businesses seem to be following Seun's notion that game economies are good for testing theories. But I'm seeing fuzzy edges where these domains don't seem so distinct.