Wacky Social Gaming

"A massively multiplayer game built on your social networks.

GXC is a team-based locally social online sport that revolves around your connections, location and interests."

OK, they can probably explain themselves better than I can, so I'm just going to link to their website and their blog.

Gapminder

Societies are complicated, and hard to describe succinctly. Summary statistics are helpful in this regard, but can quickly turn into mind-numbing tables of numbers. Graphs can help with that. It's not trivial to usefully simplify an entire society to a manageable set of graphical displays; you inevitably lose a lot of detail, and it's very easy to end up with some very misleading pictures.

Anyway, the folks at Gapminder have done some good work in visual displays of global economic and social information. It's far from perfect, of course, but I think they clearly tell some important stories. I think one of their most well-done presentations is the one for Human Development Trends 2005. You can use it with Flash, or download an executable from the same page if you'd like to see a larger version.