This post follows speculation about multitasking in games, integrating various games and the interplay between games. Drawing inspiration from Metal Gear Solid in which a psychic enemy was able to read player save games for other games, a question develops: would gaming benefit from the presence of a permanent player profile (ppp). The notion would be that any game you played would a) store any gained statistical information about the player in the ppp and b) modify any ppp statistic that overlapped between one game and another with current details. Developers could make public the relevant info in the ppp, which their game creates. Other developers could then take advantage of that info when making a realistic, player sensitive game experience. Comments?

...and then it can compress the whole thing and email it directly to the game company, who can sell it to online mortgage brokers so they can send me more SPAM...

Most players have a real issue with companies reading or tracking personal information. At best, this would have to be an ''opt-in'' feature. I personally don''t like games mussing up the registry or leaving droppings all over my hard drive.

One other comment though: I''ve seen a few people here lately talk about games communicating/co-existing together for some higher entertainment experience. It''s a neat concept, although I''m not sure how much value it would add to gamers. One current trend in gaming is to immerse the player so they continue paying a monthly fee. I don''t imagine these developers would want to dilute their potential market. There are some heavy design issues (balance!) to overcome for something like this to work, but it''s probably a valid topic for discussion.