Animal Crossing Wild World (ACWW) is a cute social game for the Nintendo DS that builds upon the principles that made the original Animal Crossing for the Game Cube a critical success. Players of ACWW, as in the original game, move into a new town, make friends, get a job, write letters, collect items, draw pictures and do other happy things. What sets ACWW a leap ahead of its predecessor is that it can connect to the internet, opening up one's town to other players from around the globe--in a way, ACWW is a distributed virtual world or perhaps a distributed MMORPG. It allows players to interact with each other's creations and share user-created content such as pictures and text. Although I haven't yet played the game, I believe it's possible for one user's creations to be shared among a potentially limitless number of other users. It's pretty amazing for a handheld console game to rival the features of huge PC-based hits such as World of Warcraft.

If this wasn't all dumbfounding enough, an enterprising ACWW user by the alias of JoeForever (featured today on GameSetWatch), has considered promoting his web site through custom graphics created inside the game. Visitors to his town of Adamsvil may find pictorial communications left at the gates. My brain is reeling by the possibilities opened up by this type of communication. Advertising. ARG clues. Artwork. Education. Contact information. So compelling is the idea of leveraging the ACWW virtual world engine that I might just pick up a Nintendo DS and run the equivalent of a 24/7 game server to see what sorts of mayhem I can come up with.