Wired: Website Analysis Isn't a Game 

Software creator Robert Savage, taken by sim games like SimCity, got the idea of creating a sim's-eye view of website traffic for log analysis. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense, with branded busses representing the various referrers and the pages representing the building structures, size dependent on popularity. Now, a few years later, watching the traffic can be downright addictive using his VisitorVille software.

Savage doesn't expect to unseat major IT rivals in the log analysis business. After all, it's hard to get a Fortune 500 firm to dump WebSideStory for something that looks like it could use a 1980s pop soundtrack. He's keeping to the $30 software crowd for now. But users of the program, perhaps attracted by its initial cuteness, swear that it is by far the most useful way to represent web traffic.