Creating passionate users: "Brains love play. Find a way to bring more play (or at least a sense of playfulness) into someone's life, and you might just end up with a fan.
Brains evolved to play, and apparently the bigger the brain, the more likely it is to play. Play turns the brain on."

Also referenced in this article: a write-up of the Serious Games Summit from last year...

"Today's games are strongest not when they're slavishly emulating cinema" - Why video games shouldn't be like the movies

The answering machine desk: "When a message is left, a box representing that message slowly rises from the desk. The higher it rises, the longer the message. So when you return home, you know how many messages are waiting for you. To hear one, open the box's lid. Pushing that box back down into the desk deletes the message."

My Favourite Computer Games of 2004: "As you complete levels the razor gets more powerful and you have to be careful not to hurt the cats or neuter them. When you succeed in shaving a cat's balls, it spits up a diamond that you can collect. But when a cat escapes, it turns into a bandage, and if you trip over the bandage, it wraps around you, and this keeps happening until you become a mummy, which scares the cats even more, which makes them more difficult to find. Also, you're allergic to the sun, which means that during the day you have to open up an umbrella, and different cats react in different ways to the umbrella. Some run away, and some turn into birch trees."

Things to say when you're losing a technical argument. Rather worringly, I've heard (or used) 12 of these so far this year. Urk.