With "MMO" Dead as a Descriptive Category, What Term Should VR Spaces Like Project Sansar & High Fidelity Use?

According to former Blizzard chief creative officer Rob Pardo (so he's biased but he's still quite correct), World of Warcraft killed the "MMO" as a descriptive category:

Speaking to Develop at the recent Games First Helsinki event, Pardo said massively multiplayer online games have expanded and evolved away from how people used to describe them. He said following the runaway success ofWorld of Warcraft after its launch in 2004, a game that still boasts some 7m users to this day, a wave of companies tried to copy the winning formula. Not one of these were able to replicate the same level of success, however... “If anything, I think people are even avoiding the term MMO. A really good example is Destiny. It clearly is an MMO. But they’re really trying to avoid calling it that, and obviously it is a very different type of game. But I think that’s a good example of how with MMOs, the term has been eliminated. But you kind of continue to see the influence in games that are persistent world games that have spawned out of that. It’s just people seem to avoid the term MMO now.”

Even better than Destiny, I'd say Day Z or Minecraft are examples of MMOs or multiplayer games with MMO's best features that aren't generally called MMOs. (For that matter, League of Legends, a multiplayer fantasy strategy game, is not an MMO and is even more popular than World of Warcraft.

There's a lesson here for Project Sansar and High Fidelity, and other "virtual worlds" (as they're usually called) which are sometimes described as MMOs (since that's their closest cousin):

With "MMO" no longer a compelling category (because then you're just compared against World of Warcraft, which sets expectations way to high), and virtual worlds no longer very popular (their heyday was 2007-2009 or so, when Habbo Hotel and other web-based worlds had huge followings), it's time to seriously consider looking for another category altogether. (And no, not Metaverse, unless or until Snowcrash is finally made into a movie.) All that in mind, maybe just simply calling these platforms "virtual reality" is the way to go.

Hat tip: Gamasutra.

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Comments

[irihapeti]

first there was a game

then there was a not a game

then there was a world

then soon there is not a world

is just a empty space

to put stuff in

+

so I think spaces is a pretty good descriptor

like espace maybe

e for experience. or e for empty. or e for enough already ok. jejeje (: