Here's one that will get you wondering. According to this patent application (Got the link from /.) the folks at NVidia are trying to patent what amounts to matching game players up together on a website and creating stats for the players. It seems like this would get in the way of all kinds of existing services. From places like MS Zone to the guys who run stats on their Counter-Strike servers.

A multiplayer game system is implemented over the WWW using a plurality of game servers dynamically linked to and controlled by a WWW server. The WWW server dynamically links game players who log on to a web site hosted by the WWW server as a function of game playing statistics for each game player which are stored in the WWW server.
[snip]
The system described relates to a method and apparatus for playing a video game among a plurality of players over a wide area network (WAN), such as the Internet, and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for screening the players by means of personal game statistics.

The patent was filed in August of 1999. Any ideas on why in the world NVidia would even bother with something like this? What could possibly be the point?