There's this facinating video [1] (about an hour long—there's also a 30 minute highlight [2]) about Will Wright's [3] new simulation/game called “Spore.”
What is “Spore?” Well, watch the video(s), but short of that, imagine a simulation where you start out as a single cell organism, evolve into multicellular life, then intelligent life, go tribal, then get civilization, go exploring locally, then globally, then into space and eventually go on to create life on other planets, only there are other people doing the same thing as you are, either on the same planet as your, or in a different star system or even galaxy.
That's “Spore.”
It's a meta-simulation, if you will.
But I'm not doing it justice—watch the video(s)!
[1] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-262774490184348066&q=spore
[2] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore