The interoperability among distributed and autonomous systems is the ultimate challenge facing the semantic web. Heterogeneity of data representation is the main source of problems. This paper proposes an innovative solution that combines lexical approaches and language games. The benefits for distributed annotation systems on the web are twofold: firstly, it will reduce the complexity of the semantic problem by moving the focus from the full-featured ontology level to the simpler lexicon level; secondly, it will avoid the drawback of a centralized third party mediator that may become a single point of failure. The main contributions of this work are concerned with (1) providing a proof of concept that language games can be an effective solution to creating and managing a distributed process of agreement on a shared lexicon, (2) describing a fully distributed service oriented architecture for language games, (3) providing empirical evidence on a real world case study in the domain ...