The Invention of the MMO

It's starting to feel like MMOs were just a product of the times we lived in, rather than a separate genre of game. In ~2004 I remember at least four MMOs: Asheron's Call, Planetside, World of Warcraft, and Dark Age of Camelot. It seems like only WoW survived, and nowadays I'm not sure the experience resembles the original anymore. Oh, and then there's EVE-Online, Runescape, Ultima Online...

Nowadays it's mostly Roblox and Fortnite. I saw some 11yo's socialize the other week. One asked the other hey, do you play fortnight? And they swapped contact info that way.

What's the genre of Roblox / Fortnite? Live service games? It would be interesting to have a separate term for them the way we had for "MMOs".

MMOs were also fun from a technical standpoint. One of my big challenges to myself was to make an MMO. I learned a lot about networking that way. When I was 13 I even ended up on the phone with a local business trying to negotiate a dedicated 10 Mbit link. He correctly told me to just wait, that 10 Mbit won't seem so crucial in a few years.

Then there were the MUDs. I'm not sure if it's correct to call them MUDs, but Gemstone and Underlight spring to mind. Underlight especially was a charming little game where you were expected to roleplay in-character whenever you were online. Meaning, no discussion about the real world. It was very addictive for a socially awkward 6th grader to just vanish into this new world.

I wonder what kind of new genres of games people will be talking about in a couple decades. It's tempting to think there's something like "the MMO" that's yet to be discovered, just like the arena shooter was.

I think they're daily grindfests now. I hear about people logging in just to do their "dailies" and thats about it. Everything new is instances, which don't capture the MMO village feel at all for me. I miss UO but I'm sure they clunky interface would drive me crazy today.

>"I think they're daily grindfests now."

They were never not grindfests. EQ, Lineage 1/2, FFXI, and most of that era were almost entirely about the grind. The difference is that you were forced to grind with friends. FFXI in particular was physically impossible to progress without a full party at all times, and there were no ingame mechanics to facilitate that. You had to talk to people and form relationships. Individual servers were real communities with long running rivalries, alliances, reputations, and prestige. That's the heart and soul of the genre that made those games unforgettable, and was lost when WoW took over and introduced dungeon finder and server sharding.

Runescape (as we remember it in the 2000s/2010s lives on in Old School Runescape or '2007scape'. Supported by Jagex, it's the Runescape you remember from 2007 but has routine community polls on new skills/quests/bosses to add.

Unfortunately, it is also known as 'efficiencyscape' as most of the player base is only concerned with doings their daily chores, completing quests as efficiently as possible, etc. The social aspect is drastically diminished.

There are a couple of distinctions here: Habitat is graphical and not merely text-based. "MMO" means "massively multiplayer online [...]" but MUD1 and the minicomputer/Unix MUDs were not "massive" but limited to a few dozen players at a time. It is unclear how many players (registered or simultaneous) were supported by Habitat, but Wikipedia seems confident to call it "MMORPG" without numbers or a cited source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)

I was involved in the campaign to increase TinyMUD capacity from ~64 players to ~256 simultaneously connected players in the mid-1990s. But nobody was calling that "massive" even when it seemed like more than we ever had.

There are other criteria that may be considered for a "massive" adjective. Size of the world, and time to explore. It seems that Habitat was rather expensive by the hour! The MUDs in academic networks were populated by students with a lot of free time, and possibly unlimited access from their CS-related majors.