Hey, folks. Just bouncing some ideas around in my head at the moment, figured I'd throw this out there. As of late I've been cheerfully getting myself addicted to Trackmania Nations Forever, a free arcade-style racing game. One of the coolest parts of this game is the central multiplayer integration. You don't play directly against other players, but instead you collect medals earned by beating ghost-car times. (I have no idea how the times are calculated, but most are pretty easy and all are doable.) The cool part of this comes from a constantly active ticker that shows your world, country, and local standings. For example, right now I'm 22nd in Maine, around 1100th in the US, and around 4000th in the world (these are random numbers, I can't be bothered to go look them up for discussion's sake). This sort of thing is a fascinating way to keep one playing: it's an accurate barometer of just how good you are compared to everyone else. Valve does something vaguely similar with the Half-Life 2 series, starting with Portal and Episode Two: Achievements, much like the XBox Live setup. These achievements are much less interesting, though, due to the lack of direct comparison. There's just less to it. I'm interested to hear your thoughts. I've had an idea for a more up-to-date sort of Roguelike floating through my head for a while. It'd be turn-based, so multiplayer is more or less out, but I was considering the idea of something like bones files from Nethack. Players can, at the start of a game, choose to play local-only or with remote content added. When you drop a level and the game needs to create a new level, the remote content game will contact the game server and ask for a bones file, which may or may not be given. If it is, the dead character's vital stats are sent, plus with maybe one or two random items they were carrying, along with map data. (For simplicity's sake, assume that maps are randomly generated based on a seed; individual items on the map can change between plays, it won't significantly matter.) As in most Roguelikes, deaths will be frequent, and somebody playing with remote content will have their game automatically uploaded to the server for viewing, ranking, etcetera. One part of me thinks this would be a cool way to foster replay in an otherwise very straightforward RPG. The skeptical part of me, though, says that this sort of thing isn't necessarily valuable, and is more hassle than it's worth except for games that are entirely focused around the score and ranking. Any ideas or riffs on the concept would be cool to hear about. -Ed

Crawl is largely centralized. I'm referring more to a central server for deaths and score tracking, nothing more.

And like I said, you can not have bones by playing local-only.