Ever play Railroad Tycoon or SimCity? There was fun in building a toy and playing god, but the games also tapped into an experience that seemed more real and physical than the computer they were played on. But in MMORPG Tycoon, you're building a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It's recursive! It's (ugh) meta! And it's a small part of the trend toward video games going meta.
On one end of this spectrum is Grand Theft Auto IV, which contained a rich in-game media world that included a mini-Internet, radio and TV shows. GTA could mock other media from the perspective of another mature medium, since the best-selling game was no niche product.
On the other end is MMORPG Tycoon, in which the player must make a popular and profitable online game by balancing in-game elements, business expenses, and technical elements such as computer servers. Tycoon uses the tools of creating games as its game. Here the jokes target the stereotypes of role-playing games and the game industry, and the intended audience is one already familiar with the genre.
Recursive gaming is not entirely new; in 2000, The Sims let in-game characters play a video game. And the RPG Spacequest let players fool around on an in-game arcade game. But now the game-playing population has exploded, as have the games themselves, with much larger and richer worlds than the two-dimensional backgrounds of years ago. In fact, some reviewers found GTA IV's mundane tasks — drive someone around, go to a club, sit through conversations — too boring. As players get used to gaming for hours and hours, they won't turn off the game for entertainment — they'll find a better game inside it.
