SPORE
Check out the future of gaming. The best aspect of Spore, in my opinion, is that it is an asynchonous MMO. That is to say that the content comes from the user community, but you don’t actually interact with other players. This keeps things fresh but play can be casual.
In my coding class we were talking about web server based programs. First everybody thought that big mainframes were going to do all the work and terminals would be nothing more than a portal for keystrokes and other input.(There was no such thing as a mouse back then.) But then things started to change when Apple released the first PCs. I actually did some consulting for a guy named Daniel Alroy whose claim to fame was an article, written when I was in diapers, about how desktop machines were going to be the next big thing. Indeed that trend has proven true. I can assert that mainframes and supercomputers became marginalized to specialized applications until the internet took hold.
Anyway these trends got me to thinking about how modern games take full advantage of both huge servers and powerfull desktop machines. Games like World of Warcraft and Second Life maintain environments for huge rosters of people. The gamer interacts with that server based world and maxes out the PC’s graphics capabilities in displaying the server based game. Spore is a reflection of that where the server side of the game actually explores the world of content created by the gamer and serves it to other users.