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Via danah boyd's blog apophenia, I found out about the Minstry of Reshelving, launched by Jane McGonigle of Avant Game.
Basically, the idea is to relocate bookstore copies of 1984 by George Orwell from Fiction/Literature to a "more suitable" section, such as Current Events or Politics. You leave a notecard in the space where the copies were previously shelved to direct buyers to the new location. Jane later added a few modifications that folks could use to play along but minimize the impact on the people who work in bookstores.
I find the idea delightful. I also think back to the pain of going through the small bookstore in the Nature Company to remove all the Chick Publications anti-gay, you're-going-to-hell pamphlets that someone managed to sneak into the shelves and into the books themselves while we were busy. In the end, I think the 1984 reshelving is speech, and I doubt it's so much of a pain for the bookstore employees that it should be quashed.
However you feel about this particular game, you should definitely read Jane's statement on avant gaming. It's short, and it's quite thought provoking.
I was just listening to a podcast on the topic of "avant gaming" this evening. At http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail465.html, Clay Shirkey was talking about the projects that his students were creating using cell phones to facilitate "big games". The prototype was "Pac-Manhattan", where a massive game of Pac-Man was being played on the streets of Manhattan, with the players being tracked and directed from a central control room, using their cell phones as 2-way communicators. I also love his description of the group as "The Institute of the Recently Possible".