Seriously, games.

Chris Messina, Losing my religion:

I will say this: I’m an advocate for open source and open standards because I believe that open ecosystems — i.e. those with low barriers to entry (low startup costs; low friction to launch; public infrastructure for sustaining productivity) — are essential for competition at the level of user experience.

It may seem paradoxical, but open systems in which secretive design processes are used can result in better solutions, overall.

Thus when I talk about openness, I really mean openness from an economic/competitive perspective.

And how will we construct “open systems” using “secretive design processes”?

Games.

Seriously. Games:

• A bounded set of social interactions that promote and incent gestures, behaviors and actions,
• To build individual status and social capital,
• Defined by a system of rules (i.e. game mechanics) and implicit and explicit economic incentives,
• Leveraging the power of mystery, positive intermittent variable reinforcement and the serendipity behind “human collisions”,
• Wrapped in a user-friendly design,
• Creating an embedded holistic accounting system that captures unvalued externalities (i.e. broad value, not narrow profit; humanity, not massconomy),
• … the secret to reconstructing capitalism.

Right?