A possibly-dumb-but-intriguing thought that occured to me, Otwell and Hill while in Amsterdam:

could you use The Sims for:
a) persona driven design?
b) testing/simulating social software design?

Just as Intel and MacDonalds have paid for product-placement in The Sims Online, if the tools where available to designers to originate meaningful simualtions of their concepts, then wouldn’t it also make an incredible product testing and proving ground?