The Post That Cannot Possibly Go WrongWhen we created the initial fake-brochure site, we thought it'd be a fantastic laugh if the fictional shipbuilders had their own intranet. If you filled in the form on the brochure site (specifying your name, email address and favourite species of frog) we followed the occasional mail about the game. Then, one day, folks got a mail from the intranet admin, "Chris Stevedave", giving folks the link to the intranet and the current password, which was hurriedly followed by a second mail apologising for the accidental mail leakage and urging customers not to click the link, then a third email noting that Chris Stevedave had been demoted to Bilge Emptier Third-Class. It worked fantastically (so fantastically that some people really did send the emails back, reassuring us that they hadn't looked at the site) everyone poured into the Starlight Lines intranet.
Have a wander around the intranet. Look at the wireframes, enjoy the status reports and play with the currency calculator.
Then go look in the forum.
The idea was to present a read-only Senior Management forum in which you'd see some of the key backstory characters getting on each others' nerves. But we figured there should probably be a writeable forum for the lower-level employees, so I spent half a day hacking up a stupidly basic forum system and forgot all about it.
Six months after the site launch, I happened to peek at the employee forum and there were ten thousand posts in there.
Secret history of Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic game
Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/JYWs9HszOQY/secret-history-of-do.html
Black swan eggs were a secret ingredient in Ovaltine. Until the late 1960s, New Zealand's Ovaltine factory harvested local black swan eggs to add to their drink mix. Since the black swan nests in colonies, collecting the eggs was easy. After the black swan population suffered great losses following a 1968 storm, the Ovaltine folks turned to chicken eggs instead.
I still wouldn't tell people, "Don't make that game" exactly, I would say, "Think about what you're making and be careful when you make it and try not to exploit players." But I mean now that we've got FarmVille and stuff like that, I pretty much would say "don't make that kind of game" because I don't see much value in it.