How About a Massive Multiplayer Wii Baseball League?

Just reading this morning about Electronic Arts' Madden football videogames adding yet more real-life content from ESPN and the NFL. Which I suppose has a certain appeal to people who want to pretend they live inside the body of Peyton Manning.

But there's gotta be room for a different kind of sports game -- one that creates its own, alternate-universe stars, the way stars emerge inside games like World of Warcraft.

In fact, something like the Major League Baseball system, including farm teams, front offices, scouts and all that, resembles a self-contained virtual world. Players come in, do their thing, move up and down based on success or failure, join teams, get involved in drama. So why not create a baseball "world" and let people from all over the globe create players and compete. The elite get to the majors, which might spawn virtual-world baseball stars that get famous in their own right.

Nintendo's Wii could add a nice twist -- player would actually have to physically learn to bat, field, pitch and so on.

There was something a little like this announced in March in Europe, called "Football SuperStars." That would be football as in soccer.

Any other games like this out there?

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