Since the advent of Spore and its integrated community and automated content sharing, there has been a great deal of excitement surrounding the idea of the "massively single-player game," where indirect interaction with numerous other players enhances a game's solo experience.
Although currently limited to propagation of superficial user-created content and hampered by the shallow and disjointed gameplay experience they are paired with, Spore's connectivity features are clearly fraught with potential and will inspire many new applications for player-to-player connectivity beyond traditional online gaming.
Many of the ideas that follow build on Spore's noteworthy accomplishments; others are inspired by its missed opportunities. Still others are related only tangentially to Spore, if at all, but they all fall within the bounds of innovative uses of connectivity in single-player games.
