Of course, it isn’t real. But what’s interesting about it to me is that it’s the real-world version of a gamers’ mod that’s existed for years. Both World of Warcraft and The Sims (as well as other games) have seen their versions of the “nude skin patch,” alternately delighting players and disgusting critics, both in the press and on the internets. It’s a very durable kind of pre-teen humor, but it’s also an example of how technology is making the world more and more like a video game. Nude skin iPhone apps aside, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

If you want a shirt, email your address to me at themetaverse at gmail dot com and I’ll get one off to you. The design is essentially the same as the cover of the DVD, but in green instead of red.

PK is fairly straightforward, giving you simple mobs to hunt down and resources to collect, within half a mile of your GPS-determined or tower-triangulated location, whether you’re on an iPhone or an Android handset. One note: I got the game going on my iPhone for about a day, but haven’t been able to get it launched since. According to a recent interview with the developers, however, there are about 70,000 more or less active players, which sounds fairly respectable to me, given the nature of the game.

Things get interesting when you notice that PK shows you the location of other players near you, and lets you interact with them, either in duels or by grouping up to go adventuring together. There are few ways to venture far outside your current location on the map without physically getting up and moving, but your contacts can invite you to join them at their real-life location, which is a nice touch. You seem to be able to plant a flag when you’re across town, then visit it from your home location, and you can stake a claim to real-life plots of land, which is interesting. A new version of the game (no longer free), is apparently due out very shortly.

Games like Parallel Kingdom are important, for a couple of reasons. (Here’s Wikipedia’s somewhat random list of location-based games. I’ve also been checking out Sphericle, which seems to have at least a small community of players.) Expect to see more of these kinds of games qua games, as powerful mobile devices become more widespread and people and become more accustomed to having information streamed to them on the go.

But location-based games are also going to be part of what gets people used to location-based services in general. Apps like Foursquare are already using game mechanics get people engaged, giving users points for “checking in” at the establishments they frequent. These and others are already giving us a taste of what life may be like when we’re streaming our locations to our friends all the time.

One thing that’s interesting to note is that this could well mean a return to the time when relationships with the people you actually knew and saw every day had a different status than those you just kept up with online. Needless to say, we never really left that time, but when you’re Facebook “friends” both with your significant other and with people you’ve never physically met, it begins to feel that way. Will we soon have Facebook “acquaintances” as well as friends? You can create cohorts using the broadcast and privacy tools of a service like Facebook, of course, but when those services start to offer such labels explicitly, you’ll know we’ve moved on to the next stage of their evolution.

I’ve written plenty about Eve in the past, so I won’t go into too much detail here about the game itself. What’s remarkable to me is how the game’s narrative, the “story” of one’s time in Eve, is driven more by the dynamics among players and corporations than by the mechanics of gameplay itself.

I was going to write that the narrative is driven “as much” by personal dynamics as by gameplay, but on reflection, that just isn’t true. In Eve, the game mechanics — the intricate systems of paper beating rock beating scissors beating paper — seem designed to drive people into either conflict or cooperation. You could play the game without ever interacting meaningfully with another player (this would be difficult, in fact), but it would be a boring slog. There is no “solo” game in Eve: even when you’re alone in space, the environment and the economy and almost all the other aspects of the game are affected by what other people are doing, to a much greater extent than in most other MMOs.

That’s one of the reasons that many Eve players become so strongly connected to the people they fly with in the game. The closest analogy that’s occurred to me is to a hardcore but amateur softball or soccer team. The results of your efforts are meaningful only within the confines of the softball league (its own virtual world), and yet are no less meaningful for that. And the relationships that form there are those fed by the experience of striving together for a common goal — just as they are in Eve (and many other contexts). Nearly the only difference is that softball players tend to be in the same physical place much more often than gamers. They may occasionally get more exercise as well…