So, Pendarious' backstory got me thinking about a hole in my setting I'd kind of been skirting around up 'til now.  I gave it some thought and have (hopefully) filled that hole in.<br/><br/><strong>Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!</strong><br/><br/>So, if GAMEs arise spontaneously as Cyberspace is expanded and GAMERs fight wars in them, what does a developer do?<br/><br/>Well, first off, some of them develop the hardware behind the GAME systems that allow us to access the GAMEs in the first place, just like in real life where they make actual game consoles (except I imagine less quantum physics is involved in real life game consoles).<br/><br/>Software developers have four jobs.  These days, these different jobs are usually split up amongst multiple different people, but back in the beginning of GAME technology (and today in small, independent GAME companies), they'd typically all be shared by a very small team of developers.  By 1995, even twenty people is considered a huge development team.  And these developers aren't called developers because they develop technology.  They develop<em>countries</em>.  In Cyberspace, of course.<br/><br/>The first job is that of an explorer.  With the exponential increase in computer technology that's been going strong since the 70s and not expected to stop until 2018, there's plenty of unexplored territory out in Cyberspace.  So developers chart the uncharted.  The second job is that of a diplomat.  This is pretty much impossible to separate from that of the explorer, because when you make first contact with a new GAME you'd like to colonize, you've got to pick sides (or else decide to let your GAMERs play both ends towards the middle, since they can't die in Cyberspace and it's no skin off your nose if the GAME ends up a post-apocalyptic wasteland when you're through with it).<br/><br/>The third job is that of a grand strategist, deciding which theaters to open up to GAMER intervention and when (some GAMEs, for example Star Wars, have huge chunks of their Cyberspace that has<em>never</em>had their coordinates disclosed by their dev team, but most devs make the coordinates known and hook them up to a GAME system within a year or so of discovering them in the first place).<br/><br/>The fourth job, closely related to the third, is that of a logistician.  They decide what kind of material gets to the player.  When new weapons, units, techniques, etc. etc. are released for an expansion pack, it's because the dev team has paid local Sprites to produce them for the GAMERs in order to help in the new theater.  When a dev team<em>nerfs</em>existing skills or equipment, it's either because the enemy Sprites have partially or completely adapted to them (mostly in the case of skills) or because the dev team has started cutting costs in having the equipment produced, which results in lower quality (mostly in the case of gear).