"The technology in games has facilitated a revolution in the art of warfare," says David Bartlett, the former chief of operations at the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, a high-level office within the Defense Department and the focal point for computer-generated training at the Pentagon. "When the time came for [a soldier] to fire his weapon, he was ready to do that. And capable of doing that. His experience leading up to that time, through on-the-ground training and playing 'Halo' and whatever else, enabled him to execute. His situation awareness was up. He knew what he had to do. He had done it before -- or something like it up to that point."

Through trial and error, players build a model of the underlying game based on empirical evidence collected through play. As the players refine this model, they begin to master the game world. It's a rapid cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis. And it's a fundamentally different take on problem-solving than the linear, read-the-manual-first approach of their parents.

In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers' mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way - means they'll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.

As business becomes increasingly distributed and virtual in nature, what kinds of leaders might emerge and what attributes will they have? To answer this, some participants suggest studying the qualities of leaders who thrive in environments that contain many of the characteristics of the new business landscape—specifically, those that are massively distributed and virtual in nature.

Perhaps the most intriguing examples can be found at the polar opposite from command and control management systems: in the emerging world of massively multiplayer online games, or MMOGs. As unlike traditional video games as universities are from the one-room schoolhouse, they traverse the Internet to enable thousands of players to interact, compete and collaborate with one another in real time. The game play exists in a persistent universe, where there is no clear beginning and end and no set schedule.

Despite a high level of complexity and uncertainty—not to mention the lack of formal hierarchy—people naturally adopt different roles and responsibilities and then get things done collaboratively. The connective tissue of this collaboration is the normalizing culture of the game itself—a common set of rules and standards binding players from different geographies, backgrounds and motivations. And, invariably, certain individuals emerge to set direction and shape the success of others.