For any people who sees games as dynamic systems, this article worth the five minutes to read it! Extract:
The art of making a great game lies in making spaces that are interesting to explore, and systems that are interesting to tinker with - like those teeming villagers in Black & White, with their multiple, interconnected needs.

To read the full article, "What's in a game?" (Thursday October 20, 2005 - The Guardian).

From the same author, the book Emergence is a very good introduction to collective intelligence & bottom-up systems, a book to be related to "Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams - Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds" by Mitchel Resnick.

The blog of Steven Johnson, http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/.

"Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" by Steven Johnson (Paperback - August 27, 2002).
Emergence