Games involve social contracts between the designer and the player(s).

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that I often think about why people play games.  For a while I’ve been batting around a metaphor that I find useful: Junk food vs. Nutrition.
Some games are simply fun.  They provide some sort of pleasure from manipulating the components or developing skill.  One of my favorite games [...]

I’ve noticed that I haven’t really been enjoying “twitch” games, that is, games that have action and focus on manual dexterity and/or timing.  I’ve especially been frustrated by those that are difficult.  Today I started thinking about why that might be the case.  (Brought on by playing Mega Man 9.)
The thing about action games is [...]

So, if you’re not familiar with MyMiniCity, you might want to check it out. I think it’s a rather clever idea.
The basic “play” of MyMiniCity goes as follows.

Create a city. This gives you a subdomain, like http://cobweb.myminicity.com (Full disclosure: It’s a city I started). Each city page has a neat little Flash map of the [...]