Can you talk more about your game idea?

In my game concept, it's a three dimensional world. You're moving through it as a character rather than just seeing it as a map. But we have the algorithms. We know how to do it. It would have been hard back when I first proposed this in the late '80s. But it's easy now that you have a globe-sized surface to work with. And you create the continents, they exist in the computer's memory in a very sketchy form. You can't see it. There's no cheat that lets you see the whole continent because nothing on it exists until you move into it. As you move into it, you have architectural paradigms, algorithms that will create cities with different cultural feels. You move into one culture and the buildings resemble each other. You move into another, color schemes and buildings look a different way, people have different races. So that when you move through the world, it's big. We don't have any big world games. The worlds are all small because people think there's no room.

But my feeling is that as long as the player is playing on a computer -- this is not a console game concept -- on a computer where you can use their hard disks to store the core data, this game can create itself on the fly. Players can have different adventures with different characters. You just end up with this tremendous database of names which can be online, added to over and over again, so that you can have literally hundreds of thousands of place names, hundreds of thousands of character names. And all generated according to certain rules. This is my dream. This is my game. But I convert other games into this concept.

Do you do this with the Sid Meier's games?

Yes. What I love about Sid Meier's games is that he lets you fiddle with the paradigms and the rules underneath. You can alter Civilization II which I'm still playing. There's been a Civilization 3 and 4, but I'm not even interested. I'm still playing the first multiplayer game. I don't play with other players. Nobody would want to play by my rules. But I've set it up so that there's minimal war and maximum civilization building, discovery, and creation. I allow myself to play to AD 2010 and no farther. That's where I stop. So the race is with myself to see how far I can get in that amount of time. And it's fun. Because I think the later game is boring when you're just building spaceships and building factories in every city, it's just, "yawn." What's fun is all the discovery phase, the building up, seeing how large a civilization you can establish. Usually I could win the game by wiping out my opponents far before that. I keep just one opponent alive off in a corner somewhere.

The real limitation of the game, and this is the one that kills me, is you can have no more than 255 cities. So you suddenly reach a time when it says, too many cities. And I just go, "Why do you have a limitation like that? Why did you decide that each city would have a two byte or one byte identifier. Why didn't you have a look-up table to find the number? Or why didn't you make it so that it was a ludicrous number like 5,000 cities, that you couldn't possibly get to. So that you knew that the player would never get that too many cities message." It just drives me crazy. It's one moment of bad design in a brilliantly designed game. But it's still bad design when it happens. But they always think, "Who would ever get to this? Who would ever play it this way?" I play it that way. That's my version of Civilization.