Gameplay concepts I’d like to explore or see explored:

• Maintaining emergence in spite of simplicity/low time commitment — e.g. how can we get the emergent gameplay of something like UO or Eve Online in a more casual milieu. (Bonus thought: why are “social games” so anti-social?)
• Play with exploration for exploration’s sake at its core. There is something very powerful tied up in the experience of discovery.
• Procedural content. Not an original thought, but I’d like to see where it can go.
• Decentralized MMP. I won’t call it P2P MMP; rather, the idea is that anyone can own a computational bubble in an MMP universe. Your own laws apply in that computational bubble. It’s your domain. Your domain may be impermanent (e.g. hosted as long as your computer is turned on), or you may spend more and perhaps own dedicated computational space (e.g. a leased EC2 node running your domain). I don’t know if this would be a game per se. I miss the sort of Gibsonian view of cyberspace that this idea recalls, or Hakim Bey’s “Temporary Autonomous Zone” if you want to get esoteric.

There are others but I’ll leave them for another time. What’s interesting is how many of these ideas could be combined (exploration game would be a massive content problem with out proceduralism.) Thoughts?