Community Design for Civics?

Jane McGonigal from Avant Game posted her ARG presentation from the Austin Game Conference.

In reading through the presentation, one particular item caught my attention:

Community design is the practice of creating new metaphors for collective experience in real life.

Aside from a similar naming convention to Social Design, there's something quite intriguing about this notion. Something about ARGs has always left me with a sense of possibility. After all, here are collective experiences that actively engage people from all different points of view while fostering creativity, play and fun. You have the active participants, the teams (as applicable) the game makers and the passerby-ers. In many ways, this is not unlike the current political or civic realm in our local communities.

That being the case, what can the civic realm learn about play, excitement, and creativity from ARGs?