[Perseus]

This is a pretty awesome thread.

I'm pretty firmly convinced that providing deeper and richer simulations is one way to create games that push the medium further than has been done before.

I'm thinking of games like Dwarf Fortress- I can't play it myself because the learning curve is insane for me, but after reading the various DF threads on different forums I have to conclude that the game is doing something very special indeed. It's a pity then, that most of us will never play it, or get very far in the game even if we try it. The barriers to entry are simply too high. What we need now is for some designer to come up with a way to make DF, or even games in the Rogue-like genre, less intimidating and more intuitive.

Once games are able to present that level of complexity to players in a manner that's not completely overwhelming, we'll start to see very interesting things indeed.