Sim Culture (or guild or city or continent or eco-system or ...)

In response to the ideas thrown around about Time, this idea has arisen: Stories can exist on many different time-frames - the story of a culture and what affects it and the "actions" it makes are on a very large time scale, but it is none-the-less a valid and enjoyable character to play. As are the stories of forests and cities and swamps and kings and fleas. So how about this: start the world out empty. The beginning (probably immortal) players create and play their characters as those with the largest time-frame - maybe cultures, maybe races, maybe continents - and they play until they decide the universe is sufficiently cool on that level. Then they start playing with the next largest time-frame, and again play until the universe on that level seems sufficiently complex. So on and so forth until the playable time-frame is that of a normal player, and let'em at it. This isn't to dictate which times players are allowed to play in - it might be lots of fun to play paleo-fae, giant carniverous megapixis and huge sea-goblins - in fact, so long as the entire world agrees on it, the time-frame can be switched at any point for whatever reason. You could play as races for a while, slow it down to play as a megapixi for a while, then speed it back up to races-level time until you wanna play a neander-fae for a while, and so on.

— Stillflame - 08 Jun 2002

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This idea doesn't have to be taken to the extreme to be useful. The SimCulture idea can be used as stillflame suggests: to create a background history for the world as the original players play races, then cultures, then kingdoms, then cities, then guilds, then individuals. This could even be used as part of the RampUp process.

These pseudo-characters (cities, kingdoms and guilds) could then be turned over to NPC !AIs: growing, living and dying according to their own cycles. They could even be part of the game-balance mechanisms, trimming professions here and adding guilds there. Richard Bartle has suggested the use of analysis tools to help keep designers and administrators of Virtual Worlds aware of what is happening. Such tools could be very symbiotic with SimKingdom-like entities, sharing information or even being connected at a more fundamental level.

— Scotus - 24 Sep 2003