One of my favorite metaphors for the Networked World comes from a source I can’t attribute. I believe I came across it in Wired Magazine in the late 1990s. In the article, the writer cited a sci-fi story that describes a future in which game kiosks have been installed on busy street corners. The kiosks alert passersby when there’s some kind of rotten thing happening to the human organism — a famine, a war, a currency devaluation, a water shortage, etc. When the alert is issued, pedestrians take to the kiosks and play a massively multplayer game designed so that the playing generates whatever kind of energy or economies are needed to correct the imbalance in the world. (more…)