Tomasulo.net

Scribblenauts is an upcoming game for the Nintendo DS with an audacious game mechanic. To help your character solve puzzles, you can summon any object simply by writing the name on the DS's touch-sensitive screen. Eurogamer has the first article I've seen that goes into how they do that on a technical level. It is actually a pretty cool extension of traditional object-oriented coding theory, in that they define qualities, like "flammable" and assign those to types, like "wood" and then assign those types to various objects, so they don't have to code every different interaction between objects in their universe. There is still a tone of grunt work that they have to do, besides defining every noun in the dictionary in this manner, they have to create art assets for all this stuff. It is a pretty cool undertaking, and they seem incredibly confident about it.