I think what once started as a term to encompass a lot (MMOx) has been outgrown, but it can still be used as a valid indicator… perhaps not of the world, but of gameplay, because by now most gamers know what kind of gameplay ‘MMO’ gameplay is, and generally what to expect. So personally I’m just fine with using ‘MMO’ as a gameplay description.

When you get to the actual world it’s a bit trickier because there are huge differences here. If I were to draw a gross classification there are two major types:

- Majorly seamless worlds with instanced pockets (WoW, LOTRO, etc.)
- Majorly instanced worlds with shared pockets (Guild Wars, etc.)

But the key here is that all of these worlds are more or less persistent, accounting for all the little differences in how they implement that persistence. So we should probably focus on that.

They’re not elegant acronyms, but I think SPW (Seamless Persistent World) and IPW (Instanced Persistent World) do the job. Saying, for example, “It’s a Fantasy SPW-MMO” gives you at a glance not only a quite precise idea of how the game world is built, but also the kind of gameplay you can expect and what kind of ambiance and environment to expect, even. I don’t think we should even mention “Massive” or “Multiplayer”. It should be assumed by now, just like you say “car” and not “internal combustion engine car”.

Not pretty, but an elegant solution that’s way more precise than “MMORPG”.

Anyway.

I agree that any Diablo-style lobby game should be thought of as just as “massive” as, say, WoW, in terms of number of people you will *actually* be interacting with at a given time.

However the term MMO is more useful for saying what form the gameplay will take. If I was going to release a game in the current climate, I would bend over backwards to make sure nobody calls it an MMO, due to the ugly community I would undoubtedly attract (some rare havens of bloggery such as this one excluded of course).

http://word-of-shadow.blogspot.com/2009/07/dont-call-your-new-game-mmo.html

This distinction has been lost over the years as the games have evolved and changed. There were epic debates years ago on the MUD-Dev mailing list about if Diablo was really a MUD/MOO.

Personally, I think the main aspect of these games is persistence. Persistent characters are one key element (implied by the RPG label), but what about the world? This is tricky, since a lot of games don’t preserve exact world state anymore. But, is there any sign in the game that another player did something in the world that didn’t happen in the current play session? Is a guild hall claimed? Is some territory owned by one team? Is loot for sale on the AH from other players? This is what sets a game apart as an “MMO” (or PSW as others used to say.)

The terminology is definitely outdated and inaccurate, but these games are so wildly different in a lot of ways that the “big tent” term may well stick for a while yet.

As Chris F over at ihaspc has noted before, even WoW, with its multitude of players, needs only forty maximum players to experience everything the game has to offer. There’s little “massive” about that number. The game *world*, rife with indirect interaction, ultimately houses more than 40 players, and those other players drive the economy, but the actual *game* of WoW really doesn’t need many people. Ditto for the rest of these.

“Persistence” in these “virtual worlds” really is more of a relevant indicator of what overall “genre” these games occupy.

All we need to know. We’ll decide which games we want to play based on the information or experience with said games.

Writing explicitly about ‘massively multiplayer’ games perhaps doesn’t make it any more straightforward to define, but it certainly gives more context than simply ‘massive’ does. Multiplayer games that were not on-line were generally limited to two or four players on consoles and home computers, although LAN play allowed for more players in some examples.

I would say that the tag of MMORPG was created to distinguish between simple games where maybe a couple of dozen players could compete simultaneously and the new breed of game where hundreds, if not thousands, of simultaneous connections were made to a central hub that also allowed any of those players meaningfully interact with any other. That ‘shards’ or ‘realms’ were created to balance loads and make scaling feasible is not an impediment to the definition, as long as a sufficient quantity of players can meaningfully interact with one another on the same server.

All this is not to say that the genre name couldn’t be redefined to become more descriptive based on the current style of games.

Even the traditional definitions of classical genres, with the possible exception of “FPS”, are not really 100% comprehensive definitions or acronyms.

RTS. Is it top-down? First person? Many or few units to be controlled?
Platformer? Is it 2D or 3D? Does it include combat via skills or simple physical collisions between sprites/objects? Does it it include some sort of character customization?

It’s an interesting exercise, but in the end it’s purely semantics. No acronym or genre definition can completely encapsulate the nature of a game or a genre. Not even “Board Games” or “Card games” – Blackjack is after all completely different from M:TG and they’re both quite technically “Card Games” if you wanna get gritty.