Forms of life as "patterns of regularity" into which we settle. Yes, I see this. "The world here sounds as if it exists outside the form of life," you write. I see this too. And yet I have also been thinking of forms of life as a kind of analytical tool. I realize that Wittgenstein sets himself against method & technique in philosophy, but the language-game can be employed as a sort of anti-method method for understanding the use of language. This is what I was driving at when I was talking about "tiles" & "overlapping" games. But this sort of analysis must be carried out with due respect for what some have called "fuzzy logic." That is, language games, if they are an analytical tool at all, are not positivistic tools: there is always a zone of uncertainty or transformation around the edges of a particular l-game. This I think accords with Mark Taylor's description of the skin. The skins around l-games are transitional zones, just as the human body / consciousness are pools of probability & uncertainty.