Ten years ago some friends and I did some preliminary design on an MMO game. Size and scope was basically the continental US, with thousands of players and hund

Ten years ago some friends and I did some preliminary design on an MMO game. Size and scope was basically the continental US, with thousands of players and hundreds of thousands of NPCs. The data involved, we estimated, would fit comfortably into less than 10 TB. It's not a technical problem, even at that time. It's strictly a design problem--once you've built such a thing, how do you populate it? What do you do to make it interesting? And as I've gotten older, sadly, the appeal of creating virtual worlds has gotten less and less. I don't want people spending time frantically toggling state in a row in a database, even one I operate and get revenue from. :(