Games

How is building and working in an organization like playing a game? Is a game a useful metaphor to use in thinking of learning organizations? I'm not just taking about "family resemblance" here. I'm thinking about some real insight into what gives life, energy and purpose to organizations. There's a lot of interesting work on content vs. context, center v. perhiphery, local v. global, order v. chaos, part v. whole, function v community, etc. in relation to organizational learning. What do games have to tell us about this. To what extent can they be used to illustrate in action some of the theoretical insights about organizations that learn?