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Why aim for Warcraft? Unless the aim is to limit research to owners of high-end computers who rank graphics at least as high as gameplay and have large amounts of spare time and will put up with grinding, then it's the wrong model to compare such a project to.

Planetarion peaked at over 100,000 players (before it went pay-to-play) and all you need to play it is a browser. It's a simple game to code, as evidenced by the countless clones that were quickly written when the owners started charging. Gameplay there happens in 3-month (or so) rounds, with rule changes each round, so it's the perfect model for the research described.

Cutting things down further, the browser-based NationStates is so trivial it's barely even a game, and there's practically no in-game interaction between players, but 1.9 million nations have been created. It works because it's a nice idea, and it has forums where people roleplay all the things the game ought to include but doesn't.

If you want a game where economics play a big part, aim it at web users. There's a huge and nearly empty market for an blackberry/iPhone MMPORG. Make it turn-based so you can play it to a decent standard even if you only log in once a day, and hard-core players don't need to check in more than once an hour. Political Asylum provides an excellent model of how this can work.

There is plenty of demand for an iPod SDK, and has been since day 1:

http://www.alteringtime.com/log/archives/96
http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/09/21/macgamesip od/index.php
http://www.ipodhacks.com/modules.php?op=modload&na me=Forum&file=viewtopic&forum=2&topic=1806
http://lists.apple.com/archives/studentdev/2001/Oc t/msg00437.html
...and so on.

Apple has their reasons for not releasing an iPhone SDK, same as they have their reasons for not releasing an iPod SDK. I assure you that not knowing the demand has nothing to do with it.

FTW!!! http://www.alteringtime.com/features/misc/?p=baggi ns

With or without Tom singing, is what I want to know.

It's been done before, and by no less than Leonard "Spock" Nimoy and a chorus of overly-wholesome '70s fly-girls

You know, a Sim Nation-type game where you manipulate the people would be kinda cool.

A friend of mine has a web game somewhat like this, but I don't really play it: Political Asylum

My multiplayer web-based game about political campaigns (though not about the US in particular.) - Political Asylum

One of the main challenges I came across in developing a political game was that politics aren't inherently very fun. A racing game or hockey game that leans to the simulation side can still be really enjoyable, but an accurate political simulation tends to be slow-paced and not scale well to large numbers of players. Of course the easy way out is to add fun stuff like assassinations, the mafia, etc....

I've developed a web-based multiplayer politics game called Political Asylum. It focusses on the campaigning to get elected rather than running the country.