A week ago, a contact at Macrobyte's biggest customer asked me to check out a game that he (er, "his son") has been playing for awhile, called Utopia. He felt that the game had some interesting groupware aspects that might give us some ideas for Conversant.

He was right, there are some interesting features.

I was checking out the game from a technical perspective, and I understand how it works well enough that we could probably reproduce it if necessary - right down to their caching mechanism - but who cares? We're not in the gaming business. They are a group-based service, and it did give me some ideas. Anyway, I ended up addicted to this game.

This game is excellent! There are virtually no graphics, other than some very large icons and the banner ads that support the game. It's a text-based RPG where you're supposed to build a "province" in a "kingdom". You work along side the other provinces in your kingdom (up to 24 others), and eventually go to war with other kingdoms.

You need to manage your budget for training the military, constructing different types of buildings (they all affect your kingdom in different ways), guiding the areas that your provincial scholars study, and lots of other things.

Anyway, the best thing about the game is that it doesn't need to suck up a lot of your time. It's designed so that you can successfully play for just a few minutes every hour (one hour equals one game day) or even a few minutes every day.

Check it out, and let me know if you decide to play.