I'm surprised someone wrote an article about Umberto Eco and his influence on video games and neglected to mention Ultima Ratio Regum [0]. It's a roguelike under development that attempts to simulate an entire world with multiple civilizations and with some kind of conspiracy at play throughout the world's history.
That's an interesting looking game, but I'm a bit confused by the reliance on the ASCII aesthetic. True, many people associate it with roguelike games, but when you are using ASCII generate portraits[1] of the fidelity they are, I can't help but feel a lot of time is being wasted on an aspect that matters little to the end result. It will either be fun or it won't, and ASCII is really just a highly constrained tile-set when used in this way.
It's not even ASCII. Blocks and "double pipes" fall out of the 127-character range easily.
I also agree that a lot of the benefits and crude aesthetics is lost on using extra codepages and fancy characters: I enjoy my NetHack on plain ASCII mode as it doesn't depend on any particular font for instance.
[0] http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/