Devs argue the term MMO on Massively
Massively asked a bunch of us in the industry our opinion of the term “MMO”, and the result is a rather nifty article. Here was my answer, but go read everyone else’s!
Raph Koster, President and Founder, Metaplace:
“I think now, at this point, now that we’ve chopped the ‘RPG’ part off of it and just say ‘MMO,’ which by itself is a meaningless acronym. Massively multiplayer online… The problem is the very word massive is not particularly useful. Sorry Massively website! But the problem is that “massive” is kind of relative. New York is a massive city, until you go to Shanghai. It’s completely relative. …
“I was never that crazy about [the term ‘MMO’]. We’ve been here before. There was a huge turf battle over the term ‘MUD’… There were people coming up with MUVE, multiple user virtual environment… random acronyms people were coming up with to describe the field. Several of us kept saying, ‘These are just virtual worlds, damnit!’ Part of the reason why that was working okay was it was fairly easy to say, and MUDs do have a very specific kind of family tree that we can point at, and they all fall under virtual worlds.
“That was great until people started calling things — without any games in them — ‘virtual worlds,’ excluding MMO-anythings. This is where you get people saying, ‘Well, [World of Warcraft] is a MMORPG, it’s not a virtual world.’ And it’s like…errrr. Because the battle has started all over again with people trying to appropriate the term ‘virtual world’ to mean Second Life or to mean Habbo Hotel. So now you have things like social virtual worlds and generic virtual worlds, and people think it means just Second Life, and that’s… wrong. I’ll say it bluntly, that’s just wrong, because WoW is a virtual world and so is Second Life, and so is YoVille. A lot of people don’t want to claim YoVille as being in the family, but it is. I much prefer to define these things by what they are rather than how many people they hold.
“I do still say MMO, because at this point it usually has the connotation of game. If you say ‘MMO’ people assume you mean a game. … Even us design types, we still need to know what we’re actually doing. The terms, right? We need to agree on a language so we can talk about it. Disclaiming something that is a massively multiplayer, comma, online, comma, first-person, comma, shooter, and saying, ‘Well, it’s not actually massively multiplayer online’… whatever. That’s clearly marketing talking.
“There are people that call them MWOs, people that called them MOGs, and people that call them POGs. There’s PSWs which is an art term for a specific sub-set of virtual world so that one gets misused all the time because it means ‘persistent state world.’ … There are some others… PIG, I’ve seen PIG, ‘persistent interactive game.’
Massively: I don’t think a game maker would like to call their game a “PIG.”
“Probably not.”
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Well, that would give a whole new meaning to This little piggy went to market!
(none of the ones I ever worked on did… 🙂
every year, every conference, every web based report, “What’s a game?”
lol
whos a gamer?
whats a hard core game?
whats a social game?
when there are more conference panels, than profitable products and real buisness models, you know youre in for trouble.:)
man. if i were the argumentative type, i’d totally jump in on that one!
m3mnoch.
I use both “online games” and “virtual worlds”. Even though I know they’re technically redundant, I’ll use both just so that whoever’s reading understands. I never use the acronym or spell out the acronym. That acronymized phrase is such an awful phrase. I mean, this isn’t the defense industry. We don’t have to abbreviate and acronymize everything. Let’s just speak plainly. I like Erling Ellingsen and Min Kim’s responses. I’ve never heard of “online games” being interpreted as “poker games” though, but that might just be because I talk to industry folks almost exclusively.
I think this quote says it nicely:
Joshua Drescher, Warhammer Online Associate Producer, Mythic Entertainment:
“Seventy-five percent of the titles on the market that claim to be ‘MMO’ are actually single-player or limited group-oriented games that just happen to have lots of other people running around, doing the same things and having no impact on one another. In my view, to truly be a ‘massively multiplayer’ experience, the extant population of the game world has to have some sort of impact on you – regardless of whether or not they’re in your raid group or guild. Otherwise, you’re basically just regarding those thousands of other people as window dressing and they might as well be NPCs at that point…
“I certainly think we need a new term for all the things that are currently being called ‘MMO’ that aren’t actually doing anything interesting with those massive populations. For other, ‘proper’ MMOGs, I think the term is perfectly acceptable as-is.
Many games now are what I call “Graphical Lobby Games” (GLG)
Games where the ‘Main world’ is nothing more than a graphical waiting room while you choose you instance.
PotBS was one such game – the ‘Travel Map’ allowed players to move around the world and see one another and chat but meaningful interaction there was very limited.
To interact the players had to go into another instance (Battle instance or town instance) and in the case of a town instance interaction was limited to chat and trade and again to fight another instance was required.
So, the Travel Map was a ‘lobby’.
The DDO design is similar (GLG)
Then there is Champions Online where it doesn’t even really have a group lobby.
That game is more like a Player Instance Assignment Manager? (PIAM?)
(With the front end siply helping to distribute players between instances and zones)
These games are fun and Multiplayer… but are they MMOs?
Well thank God the Warhammer producer with his completely linear and dull game chimed in.
Unfortunately there is a lot of linear and dull going around….
…it’s the fashion?
@Sanz : He has a point though.
I believe all those games have a varied palette of online actions. A game like WoW (and WAR!), for instance, could be argued to have little persistence beyond storing characters and their inventory. So, saying it’s a virtual world would be a stretch, and it’s more akin to the GLG Joshua Drescher is describing… A virtual theme park if you will : once players leave, the world stays (almost) the same.
So, given that there is much variation on the scope of what online games can be, we could therefore characterise them with a more generic term: Online Oriented Games.
I believe the very essence of these games is not the concurrent number of players, not the persistence or the interaction level with the world; but it’s the fact that without its online component, the game would be meaningless.
In defense of Warhammer, had they gotten their idea of PvP to work and balance it would have fit the MMO definition he was going for.
And yes, Champions is fun. And I think the open world missions create that MMO fell. But it’s easy enough to avoid if you don’t want it.
1. Game = G
2. Role-Playing Game = RPG
2. Multi-Player Role-Playing Game = MPRPG
3. Online Multi-Player Role-Playing Game = OMPRPG
4. Persistent Online Multi-Player Role-Playing Game
Voila
Introducing the POMPRPG (c) 2009 Corwin
See the problem, now?
POMPRPG sucks…
We don’t pick names because they make sense. We pick names because the acronym looks cool.
This reads like 1960s folk singers arguing about what is and isn’t a folk song. A lot of the joy goes out of it. Just sayin’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF89swJ9IU
Acronymoniously yours.
MMO games are worlds that exist in virtual space. They’re virtual worlds. Anything beyond that is a connotation that is imposed on the term, not anything denoted by the term itself.
Champion’s Online’s instances are just a particularly dynamic solution what designers have been struggling with since the beginning – load balancing. Too many people in one place, and what you’ve got is less a virtual world than a slideshow. The traditional solution is to hard-divide the player base onto different servers (comprised of a multitude of subservers to further balance the load). Champions does the same thing, only in a dynamic manner… and any player can travel to any open world instance, rather than being locked into a single server.
And we know what you get when you give humans a dynamic system that they can impact — they slaughter the wildlife, massacre the natives, chop down the vegetation, drain the wetlands, pave over the resulting wastes and build a Wal-Mart. While modeling that dynamic makes for an interesting (if depressing) simulation, it tends to be a crappy game. And what you get when you let players have a direct, measurable and involuntary impact on other players has less resemblence to “Lord of the Rings” than it does to “Lord of the Flies”.
Ok, I’ll follow your lead and call them PIG from now on, or POS.
for Len it’s not a virtual world unless Felcia Day is in it;)
Nice interview 🙂 I too am pretty fed up with everyone referring to MMORPGs as just MMOs. Goes to show how much people care for the RPG element.
If I leave a Monopoly board set up on a table, does it then become a “Virtual World” ?
@Olivier Carrere,
I wouldn’t describe WoW as a Graphical Lobby Game (GLG).
The difference is this:
In WoW the world (where you travel, fight, explore etc) serves a purpose and you can participate with other players you can see there.
So, if you come across another player fighting a Boar you can, if you choose, wade in and help (IIRC – I only really trialed WoW for a short time).
If you choose to PvP (Duel) in WoW you stay in the main world to fight and other players can watch.
Compare that to a game like Pirates of the Burning Sea (for example) where you cannot fight in the main world (you go to an instance). Players cannot observe or join in (based on some rules and exceptions). Players in the main world see a ‘marker’ but that’s it.
So, the travel map in PotBS could almost be replaced by a pull down menu system.
The main world in WoW really couldn’t.
DDO is much the same and the information on SOE’s The Agency and CME’s Stargate Worlds suggested much the same idea too.
Those games would all feature a common area that avatars cold move around but the interaction (beyond movement and chat) in those areas was very limited.
For me – what makes MMOs unique as MMOs is the persistence and the interaction level within the world.
Games like PotBS, DDO and many other recent MMO releases are more like a single player game to me. In fact, in some cases you can play the game for hours (even days, weeks, months) before others even notice you or you need to notice them. That is what Joshua Drescher is saying too.
There are Browser Based games that do a better job of presenting a ‘living world’ (Pardus, Urban Dead etc) where the players have a presence in the world even after they log out.
@Yukon Sam,
To say that Champions Online is simply an MMO Designer’s answer to lag and load balancing is a slippery slope. Because if that’s the issue then the answer is to simply produce single player games with Multi-Player ‘Arenas’ and call them MMOs. Is X3 (Egosoft) an MMO? If I add a mutli-player component, make players play online, control NPC spawn from my server and charge a monthly fee does that make it an MMO?
As for “And we know what you get when you give humans a dynamic system that they can impact — they slaughter the wildlife, massacre the natives, chop down the vegetation, drain the wetlands, pave over the resulting wastes and build a Wal-Mart. While modeling that dynamic makes for an interesting (if depressing) simulation, it tends to be a crappy game. And what you get when you let players have a direct, measurable and involuntary impact on other players has less resemblence to “Lord of the Rings” than it does to “Lord of the Flies”.”
to me this is a design issue.
If players are slaughtering ALL your wildlife then there are a number of things you can do (and should do) to address the issue.
A ‘bigger world’ or less players per area (lower player density) just as a start. More wildlife. Tougher and more aggressive wildlife. Less benefit:time ratio for killing wildlife… the list goes on.
I am a big believer that through design you can actually make players behave a certain way (most of the time) even though they supposedly have ‘lots of choices’ (including slaughtering wildlife) they can be guided to make different choices.
How often do you fight boars in the real world? Or duel other people? Heck, if you wanted to solo RL and eliminate interaction with other people, you can do that too.
Calling anything short of “The Matrix” a virtual world is not really doing the term justice. If the goal is to actually describe what these games provide, then you have to use adjectives in the definition.
IMO, all we’re talking about here are games and forums, and sometimes a mix of the two.
I’ve seen a lot of advertisements for games these days, that are using the term MMO even for regular multiplayer games. For game matching services, I mean. They’ll have an eight-player racing game online, but because the matching system selects from hundreds or thousands of potential matches, they call it “Massively Multiplayer” when it’s really not. By that standard, even Battle.net and it’s connected games, Warcraft 3, Starcraft and Diablo 2 are MMOs, which doesn’t even make sense.
People are just trying to milk the term. I suppose it’s natural, if you look at the history of language, but it is still frustrating.
I tried to coin the term “Social MMO” in GDC this year in regards to the kinds of worlds such as Habbo. I’m not sure if that’s technically correct, but when I hallway tested the term, it seemed to set people’s expectations right. Too bad nobody seemed to notice – might be due to the fact that my slides weren’t showing up.
It’s all semantics.
UO used to lag up to the point people could barely move when dozens of people were on the screen at the same time.
This has improved over time with faster server hardware and the wider use of broadband, but for instance does 5000 people online scattered across a shard really deserve to be called massive regardless of whether they can all come together in a single area?
And if you want real time action, aren’t the constraints for games like Call of Duty and Bad Company exactly the same as WoW, UO, EQ, SB, SW:G etc?
In the argot wars, the most powerful clique will win.
People don’t choose terms because they are inherently meaningful. They choose them because they want/need to belong to a group that uses them. The instability in the terms is a consequence of the instability in the market. Because the cliques are fluid, so are the terms.
So yeah, Cube, you need Felicia this season. Next season, unless she does manage to establih a dynasty, it will be the next pop tart. That’s thought leadership in pop culture.
I think len’s right. I’ve lived through so many coding pardigms (old concepts repackaged with new terminology) that I finally created my own… I call it YoGI-WIFI… You’ll Get It When I Finish It (there’s actually a “damn well” in there, but it ruins the acronym).
Point being… you can call it whatever you like, your users will probably call it something different, and if you make the history books it’ll probably be retroactively classified as something else instead. If, for example, future developments allow for hundreds or thousands of full FP3D avatars to appear in the same virtual space without lag, today’s MMOs might be reclassified as Limited Access MMOs… LAMMOS.
Can’t we just go back to MUD?
It was so much better.