We are moving towards a massively and diversely connected world populated by a seamless network of intelligent, dynamic distributed systems engaged in a shared interaction with the physical world and each other through unreliable sensors, actuators and noisy communication channels. These systems are extremely delay sensitive, so that coding over long blocks of observed data might not be feasible. Furthermore, information exchanges are geared towards maximizing payoff, rather than towards simply recovering the information sent, as in classical information theory.