He talked about how the approach game designers take to creating video games can be applied to web design. I quite like this cross-disciplinary approach. There are four points to consider:

1. Challenges - You want to engage users. This doesn't mean pissing them off, but "Don't Make Me Think" is really a misnomer: make people think (or enable them to think), but don't make them frustrated.
2. Rewards - Games reward you for completing a task or level. How can your site reward visitors for completing a step towards a goal?
3. Goals - Of course, people come to your site to accomplish something.
4. Feedback - Sounds like a standard design guideline, but it's worth repeating. Let people know where they are and what they've done.

These aspects--borrowed from game design--can be used to approach the design of emergent web systems. The goal it to create a small rule or system or pattern that can then expand out or up as needed.

Maybe we need to start talking about fractal patterns or self-similar patterns in information architecture? Now there's a PhD dissertation topic for you: fractal information archticture.