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Lets do both.... an MMORPG combined with Bitcoins...

http://dragons.tl/

If PETA thinks that Pokemon is bad, I would like to direct them to this so-called game that makes a sport out of tipping cows! I would like to encourage PETA to protest my game in the most vocal way possible, because, damn, it's tough getting free press for a gambling game. Get it on Slashdot, on Gamespy, on CNN and on Time Magazine's site. Please? PETA? I'll give you a soy cookie!

Well, I'll slashvertize my game: Dragon's Tale is a gambling MMORPG where every physical object in the world is a different sort of novel gambling game. Some are skill based, some pure luck. It's like Disney World for gamblers, and it accepts *only* Bitcoin. I'm also the designer of A Tale in the Desert, a game that's been covered on Slashdot and pretty much every major gaming site (back in the day - it was released in 2003) and is pretty highly regarded.

So now you know of two places that use Bitcoins. Oh, and if you look here you'll find several thousand more. (But I suppose then you could no longer say "I've yet to read about...")

I do most of the design and programming on A Tale in the Desert and Dragon's Tale and I've seldom/never needed to do an integral or solve a system of differential equations. Understanding those concepts does frequently influence game design, however, so having taken those courses was important, at least for the kind of games I do. (Giving specific examples would require that you are familiar with gameplay for each of those games, but feel free to contact me directly if examples would be helpful.)

But on to specific branches of math: You'll certainly use linear algebra doing 3D programming, and IIRC that's considered "beyond" calculus. (If you're using OGRE or Unity 3D, at least at the API level then I'm surprised you haven't run into this.) Applied Math, which is often a college freshman course for a CS decree is crucial to all sorts of programming, especially games. Combinatorics is critical for game design, though if you're just planning to be a programmer, not so much. Numerical Methods will teach you exactly when and why rounding errors to happen, how they can compound each other, and in general help you write squeeky-clean math code. The game I'm working on now is a gambling MMORPG - I probably don't even have to say how important statistics is, if this sort of thing is in your future :)

Notice how different each of the math subjects above is? A lot of this comes down to learning how to learn, and that's the one thing that in my experience differentiated high school academics from college.

Data to the contrary: Dragon's Tale is obscure compared to MtGox, yet we did 13k BTC of business last week.

Bitcoin hasn't gone away. It may not be an investment to hoard at the moment, but as a currency it's functioning beautifully. I run Dragon's Tale, a casino MMORPG hybrid, which uses Bitcoins exclusively. Our new-players-per-week initially peaked right at the peak of the Bitcoin bubble (around 120 new players per week for a couple weeks), dropped to about 20/week, and has been growing for the last few months. Currently we get around 60 new players per week. Revenue from Dragon's Tale's hasn't passed our other game, A Tale in the Desert yet, but on several recent weeks it's come close.

Players love Bitcoin because deposits *and withdrawals* are instant, unlike all other online casinos. I know that some of my players also play poker at Seals With Clubs, a Bitcoin-only poker site. They may have a win at Dragon's Tale, shoot the money over to Seals, shoot their winnings back to DT, or into their Silk Road account to buy some goodies, or into their desktop wallet. If Bitcoin were never to go beyond gambling, it will be a success: it allows all Bitcoin-based casinos to function as one huge meta-casino.

FWIW, my company has released (public Alpha) a game that revolves entirely around Bitcoins. It's a cross between a casino and an MMORPG - the first of it's kind, from what I can tell. Dragon's Tale is filled with novel games of luck and skill. Some skill-based games have a >100% EV for the smartest players.

It's built on the same platform as A Tale in the Desert, so native Linux, OSX, and Windows clients are available.