Village Sim is actually similar in appearance to an idea I had for a game, Sim God. It's essentially a planetary ant farm for a god. Civilizations would start out as simple villages and progress from Stone Age to Space Age. Here's the thing, though: the game progresses even if you do nothing. You've got a world in a bottle. So civilizations will grow and fail, wars will occur. If you end up with multiple nuclear powers, you could even see WWIII and everyone gets blasted back to the Stone Age again.

So, where does the God part come in? You get to play the role of a diety trying to influence events. Black and White promised to be that sort of game but it was [censored]. If you want to be a vengeful diety, you can just break stuff and watch the people scurry around like ants. If you want to play seriously, then you start from scratch with simple villagers. You gain believers through your acts and their worship gives you more power. The Laws you lay down will influence the way your believers develop and behave. The two broad playstyles I'm imagining are good and evil. Good doesn't expand through conquest but through cultural dissemination and assimilation. Your believers may be conquered but in time the conquerers become converts. Evil tromps over everyone.

It sounds like an impossibly complex idea but so does Civilization the game when you stop and think about it. That one first game out on what, 286's with EGA graphics? Our Palms already beat that! Ha!

One of the big appeals to this idea, I think, would be just watching things develop. I figure you could have a series of zooming views that would let you survey the planet with the lowest zoom level depicting your followers, about the same scale as Village Sim. Here you can see them carrying out your Laws. The backgrounds of the cities would change according to the technology level and level of good to evil of your religion. The biggest bear in the project would probably be creating all the graphics to account for the different ways the religions could go. Also, a question would be "how dark do you want the game to get?" You can handle warfare and conquest in a cartoony fashion but the nastier evil religions could have human sacrifice and the like. You could zoom in to village view and see love and peace or you could see witch burnings. Then again, that's your opportunity to perform a direct and personal miracle. Smite the witchfinder with boils and maybe they'll get the idea that you aren't happy.

The game controls I'm thinking of for this would take a clue from Village Sim, complex results from the lowest number of buttons and doodads possible. I figure your only real tools would be adjusting the morality sliders in the Book of Law and performing certain miracles. The simplest miracles would be visions, how you got followers in the first place. The most complex would be Biblical plagues and Armageddon destruction. All that develops comes from those simple influences.

Additional wrinkles that could be added to the game would be opponent AI gods around the world. For wireless multiplayer, the handhelds could sync every so often. I'm not quite sure how you'd go about preserving gamestate. I love the idea of the persistent world but naturally you can't have a real-time connection between your handheld and your friend's. Maybe a random number hash that would keep both handhelds using precisely the same "random" events, those numbers updated each sync? Player inputs would be traded, new hashes created, and then the handhelds could run in the background for a fixed amount of time between the next sync. Maybe a game rule could be "allow no more than x hrs of real-tme progression between syncs?" That way if you two can't sync for a while you don't run the risk of the game getting away from you.