Sep 09 2008
POW = Persistent Online World
I absolutely despise the MMORPG acronym. It is virtually unpronounceable. It is too long. Perhaps worst of all, it does a poor job describing what a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game really is, or what is most distinctive about it. I started a discussion recently on a game developer mailing list in which I sought a replacement for MMORPG. My favorite response suggested POW for Persistent Online World (thanks, “cruise“). In this article I will break down the flaws (as I perceive them) in the term “MMORPG”, and then I will explain why POW - Persistent Online World - should supplant it.
Breaking Down the atrocity that is “MMORPG”
Massively - What exactly is massive? The number of players? The size of the world itself? The variety of gameplay options? The number of players is actually not that massive nowadays. POWs make such heavy use of sharding that a modern POW server rarely peaks over 2000-3000 players. Most popular MUDs 10 years ago could do at least 10-20% of that, and there were even a few that could crack one or two thousand. The world size itself is not that huge either, and the massiveness is generally an inconvenience rather than a feature. POWs rarely utilize their game world in an interesting way any more. As for gameplay variety, about all you get now is combat and maybe an Auction House. That’s it for gameplay. So “Massively” is a waste of a term. It is unclear what it refers to, and it gives attention to things that really are not that important in the grand scheme of things (other than a massive amount of gameplay features, but we all know that is not what Massively means currently).
Multiplayer - Gee, really? This is almost redudant now for anything that is online. Perhaps worse, modern POWs are barely multiplayer. The heavy quest based advancement results in thousands of people “soloing together.” Calling these games multiplayer is almost a joke.
Online - We finally have a part of MMORPG that is accurate, worthwhile, and informative. It comes as no surprise that POW shares this word.
RPG - Role Playing Game. Hahahahahahahaha. Role Playing… on a MMORPG… HAHAHAHAHA yeah right. There is about as much role playing on MMORPGs as there is cancer research. The continued abuse of the term “RPG” is cruel and unusual. Furthermore, the king of the MMORPG genre is barely even about character development anymore. Your gear is a thousand times more important than your actual character. It would be more accurate to call World of Warcraft a GPG = Gear Playing Game.
Pronunciation - Muh-More-Puh-Guh. That sounds lovely… not. It sounds like someone vomiting in their mouth and fighting desperately to keep it from spewing through their lips. Do we really expect this acronym to make ANY traction outside the insular walls of fandom? Do we expect people writing in major newspapers or magazines to use the term MMORPG? Do we expect people on tv to try and pronounce this word, or stumble through the equally lame Em-Em-Oh-Arr-Pee-Gee six syllable monstrosity? This terrible acronym alone probably costs the online gaming business hundreds if not thousands of main stream media stories.
Attempted Improvements - The most commonly attempted improvement is MMO. I have used it here on Muckbeast, I read it all over the internet, and I hear it in interviews. This is easier to say, but still sounds dull (Em-Em-Oh). If you break down this term it really just sounds ridiculous. Convert the following television interview:
Interviewer: So Bob, tell us about Gameco’s newest MMO.
Bob: Well Interviewer, we are very excited about FantasyLand. It is really going to be a revolutionary MMO. Fans of MMOs will really get into this new game.
Translation:
Interviewer: So Bob, tell us about Gameco’s newest Massively Multiplayer Online.
Bob: Well Interviewer, we are very excited about FantasyLand. It is really going to be a revolutionary Massively Multiplayer Online. Fans of Massively Multiplayer Onlines will really get into this new game.
Read that “aloud” in your mind. Sounds terrible, right? I’d almost prefer actual vomit in my mouth.
Why Persistent Online World, or POW?
First, it is a true acronym. The abbreviation actually forms a word, and the word itself is very action oriented. POW! Excitement. Fun. Right in your face… POW!
Second, all three letters very clearly describe critical aspects of what we currently refer to as MUDs, MMOs, MMORPGs, etc.
Persistent - If your MUD/MMORPG is not persistent, then all you have is Diablo. I love Diablo, but I don’t love it for the same reasons I would love a game like Threshold , Primordiax , Dark Age of Camelot, or even World of Warcraft.
Online - As I noted before, this one is kinda obvious but important. The word online also inherently implies multiplayer, or at least the option of playing or communicating with other people.
World - This is the real crux of it. MUDs and MMORPGs are supposed to simulate worlds. They are supposed to be more than just games. If they are just games then they don’t deserve to be called something special. They should just be Action, FPS, RTS, RPG, Adventure, or whatever.
POW really puts the focus where it should be - on the persistence, the online, and the world. So go out there and start spreading the word. Here is an example of how that conversation might go:
You: What games do we play?
Random Dude (RD): MMORPGs?
You: <POW right in the face> No! We play POWs! Persistent Online Worlds.
RD: <rubbing nose> Ow!!
You: Not “Ow!”, I said POW! <punches RD in the face again>
2000-3000 players is pretty massive when you compare it to the “huge” Quake games of 32 or 64 people. And aside from Planetside, there’s been little progress on that front.
Also, RPG with a computer has meant character advancement via gear, statistics and spreadsheets for a long time. If Final Fantasy or the gold box AD&D games can be classified as RPGs, so can World of Warcraft. And if you prefer to have storytelling to be a requirement for a compute RPG, let me remind you that even games such as Fallout, Planescape Torment or the Elder Scrolls series used stats to set your options in dialogue. From the game engine’s perspective, it doesn’t matter whether you shoot or talk the Big Bad to death.
Finally, I think that Diablo is even more persistent than WoW.
At least if I kill something in Diablo, it stays dead until I log off. Things respawn in WoW if I wait a few minutes. And when I log off in WoW, the server stores about the same things as Diablo did: My stats and gear. I’d hardly call that persistence.
@Shalkis:
There may be 2000 to 3000 players online, but that is never a good thing. The more players online currently, the worse the gameplay, due to having lag issues, multiple players attempting to access the same content, general noise in chats, and other miscellaneously getting in each other’s way. To take WoW, there has been a maximum of 80 players all involved in actually playing with each other at once, in Alterac Valley. And they turned that from being strategic to racing to finish before the other side does. Which technically is “multiplayer”, but is more like you’re posting times and comparing.
You’re absolutely bang on about what is classified as an “RPG” nowadays, but I’ll point out that when dialogue options are intelligently implemented you can still mostly talk your way through things if you choose appropriate responses. For example, Mass Effect for 360 specifically colors dialogue options that will provoke certain responses… I think it would have been interesting if they’d gone a step further to make some options available and as you skill up your conversational skills the options that will lead to “nice” or “naughty” consequences get highlighted to help guide you through, with maybe a few more options getting added in. There are ways to make it a real RPG, even with stats existing.
I totally LMAO for your last comment - I totally empathize on respawning. The things the game keeps as persistent are totally underwhelming, and it doesn’t even remember that I just killed something long enough for me to get through the area. Especially in an instance, where one would think it could remember that I’d killed these things, as it is an instance saved to me and my group. It’s not even a good game mechanic, as it drives groups to break up when the respawns pop up, even if they’ve already cleared to another area, as they’ll have to repeat everything over as things respawn in sequence.
@Cambios
I think Rithlyn has a point with “Prisoner of War”, which is baggage that comes with the acronym, but I still think you’re absolutely right with how unwieldy the word is. Ideally, an MMORPG that really had in it what those letters stand for would be awesome, and maybe it’s good for encouraging designers to strive towards that. Still sounds like you have a stutter when you say it, though. : (
There needs to be something better, most of the games out there are really only MOGs, Multi-player Online Games.
2000-3000 players: Yeah, it sure sounds like a lot. But is it really? In most modern POWs, you spend 90% of your life in an instanced dungeon. It really isn’t massive any more, is it? At that point, its down to 5, 6, 8, 10, 20, 25, or 40 people. That is decidedly UN-massive. Back in the day, dungeons were open. You could run into all sorts of people at random down there. You could save someone’s life if they made a bad pull. Someone could save YOUR life if you made a bad pull. You could be considerate of someone’s “camp spot”, or you could be inconsiderate. The same could happen to you from other people. The opportunities for interaction were enormous. People’s server reputations were made or broken in the way they behaved in dungeons or other zones, because interaction MATTERED.
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Honestly, POWs could have 90 million people on them but it wouldn’t matter since you almost never interact with them. The game design is more about getting you AWAY from people, than giving you reasons to interact with each other.
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RPG: I am well aware of the fact that this term has been bastardized and turned into “character development.” The reality is “RPG” has almost no meaning now, so there’s no need to slap it onto the end of MMO or POW. Furthermore, as I noted, in WoW *character* development is almost irrelevant. It is gear development. That is even father away from what an RPG was and should be.
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Furthermore, just because the RPG term has been stretched to its limits does not mean POWs should get a pass on completely ignoring “role playing” elements. They could at least TRY to throw some role play elements in, or give people who want to RP some RP tools. Right? I mean if you want to call yourself an RPG, at least pretend you care a little about role playing.
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RESPAWN: Respawn inside an instance makes absolutely no freakin’ sense to me. I understand why open places need respawn. If they didn’t, the world would be totally depopulated. But an instance? The whole point of an instance is the fact that it is your own private slice of the world. Having respawn in an instance is just thick headed developers who can’t even understand why games have respawn in the first place.
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POW: Rilthin, I accidentally deleted your comment. Sorry about that. The Prisoner of War thing just makes the acronym a little grittier. But Prisoner of War is PoW, not POW, and it is pronounced “Pee-Oh-Dubya” not “POW!” I thought about this originally, but I really don’t see it as a problem. PoW is a totally different context, totally different pronunciation, different capitalization, and is really a term from a different era. A “tank” is nothing like a real life tank (which has enormous offense) and DPS stood for “Department of Public Safety” long before it was Damage Per Second. The same combination of letters works fine if it is used in different milieus.
Great article! We’ve had the millstone of MMORPG around our necks for too long it seems. Every now and then it’s a breath of fresh air to re-examine what those acronyms stand for and if they are even relevant in the mono-culture of Blizzard’s WoW.
“There is about as much role playing on MMORPGs as there is cancer research. The continued abuse of the term “RPG” is cruel and unusual. Furthermore, the king of the MMORPG genre is barely even about character development anymore.”
Brilliant! This made me laugh. Never have truer words been spoken about WoW and the constant misuse of the term “RPG”.
I thought that Mass Effect already opened up some additional dialogue options according to your skills. At least I remember my friend’s ruthless military guy successfully threatening the smuggler to reveal his cache in the first mission.
Personally, I’d like to see something like this in an RPG when it comes to dialogue:
Perception stat makes your character spot discussion cues which will be highlighted in the NPCs’ replies. For example, if the NPC mentions that his mother died, “mother” gets highlighted.
Intelligence stat allows you to piece together cues gathered with Perception. If the NPC had mentioned orcs before, you could ask whether his mother was killed by orcs.
Finally, there’s the Charisma stat. This refines your replies to be less blunt or otherwise offensive. It turns “So the cold coot couldn’t outrun a few greenskins?” to “Was your mother murdered by the foul orcs?”
Note that Charisma would also work with evil characters. It’s the difference between a thug with a baseball bat demanding protection money and a pinstripe shark wondering aloud about the terrible possibility of arson.
Meh, if it were me I’d campaign to go back to MUD. That’s got everything right there.
But then again I am sort of biased in that respect.
I agree Tim. I think MUD was perfect actually. Multi User Domain. It also has 30+ years of history, giving the genre some gravitas and history - more history than console or PC games even.
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But sadly, the graphical MUD folks seem to look at the term MUD as if it has leprosy. That is typically short sighted of them.
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MUD is also a nice, simple word. It really gets your attention. Say it out loud a few times.
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Tell you what… if POW fails… you wanna help me try to get MUD more popular?
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As much as I do think POW would be a great term, the larger point is this: MMORPG sucks as a term. We need something better, and we actually do need to take it seriously. This horrendously bad term really hurts us in efforts to get mainstream, broad media attention and access.
@Shalkiss
Hmm… I was kinda unclear there, my bad. What I was trying to say is that in Mass Effect the ability to talk yourself through a situation generally REQUIRED a dialogue skill in order for the dialogue option to show up. There were a few times, such as dealing with the Consort or if you’d picked up Wrex’s armor, where you could still talk yourself toward the desired result without having to have a particular conversation skill. I think that’s what I was trying to say.
I love your points on perception, intelligence, and charisma having a direct effect on conversation. They did that in Fallout and Fallout 2, and I’m really hoping they’ve kept it in Fallout 3, it made dialogue much more interesting, and created a more realistic feeling way to get through a conversation, and still let you insult someone if you wanted to… you just had a much wittier insult if you were smarter. In comparison, the little conversation mini-game from Oblivion was a decent idea, though it felt much less organic than Fallout’s method.
@Cambios
I definitely agree with you on the 2000 players soloing, there should be more opportunity for interaction. I remember dismounting to help another player having a problem with respawns as they’re trying to take down a quest monster, or having another player drop a single good heal on me when I was in a hairy situation. That really built a community among players going through the same content.
On the other hand, I really like having the option of instances, to limit interaction with people I really wish hadn’t bought the game. Open air “dungeons” are a great idea, as long as you’ve got a way to hang out with just your buddies to go do something. There’s nothing quite as aggravating as getting ambushed or otherwise thwarted by another player in the middle of a complicated encounter.
“Massively multiplayer”, in my understanding, is to distinguish 100-1000 player games from, say, an online multiplayer game of chess. Chess has a fixed number of players (2, in case any readers are unfamiliar with this classic game
), whereas a “massively multiplayer” game allows anyone to join at whim.
Roleplaying game? Hmm. You know…. Chess is a roleplaying game. Especially if you’re a talking mouse, on board a ship called the “Dawn Treader”.
I’m not sold on MUDs. I’m less sold on POW. I just can’t help but see Prisoner of War, and MUD seems, well… mundane and undesirable.
Granted, MMORPG is both unwieldy and a misnomer, but I’m not sure that either of those options is all that much of an improvement, at least in my mind.
Also, isn’t “Online” somewhat redundant? You really can’t have a persistent virtual world with near-omnipresent access without it being online these days. I agree that “multiplayer” is redundant if you’re going to mention “online”, though. If I had to be online to play a single player game, that’s a game that I’m going to boycott.
Not every online game functions the same way in the first place. There might be MMORPGs (or their diluted descendants), but there are also MMOFSs (flight sims), MMOFPSs, MMORTSs, and such. I think that’s where the shortened MMO acronym comes from, since it doesn’t indicate the gameplay, just the nature of the playerbase.
As such, I agree with the diagnosis that “persistent online worlds” is a good description of what we’re aiming for. I just can’t see that POW is going to be something that endears us to the media in any way, especially not to military folk. I wonder what BBB would think about it, come to think of it. Mayhap I worry overmuch.
The Massive term actually came about very early on, and it referred to 64+ people. It has only recently been interpreted to mean something more like 1000+
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But the thing is, the Massive nature of POWs is really in question as instancing gets more and more out of control.
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I like intancing, but it has to be used in moderation. When used for EVERY dungeon, you basically create thousands of mini shards where people play in their own private world all the time. That removes player interaction from the equation entirely.
As previous posters have pointed it out, MMORPG very clearly describes the genre. But it’s too long , so MMO has become the short term for it. SOAP once meant simple object access protocol, but today it just means SOAP. to me it’s the same with MMO, nobody cares what the acronym really stands for.
So i don’t see the need to create a new artificial word for something, that’s already there.
The problem is, MMO sucks. It sounds bad and it isn’t a word. And it makes no sense. So its basically an epic fail.
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Honestly, whoever came up with MMORPG should be flogged. And whoever shortened it to MMO… well, nice try, but you get a flogging as well.
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If not POW, we need something, and we need people using it to get it to take hold. What do you suggest? I kinda like POW honestly, even though I didn’t come up with it.
MUD. That’s all we need, and for no more than the points you made earlier; it fits, it’s a word, and it IS one of the gaming roots. MUD is great…or maybe MUDORPG_W/BGS.
And you guys saying that RP shouldn’t be used for these games are way out of line. I’ll have you know that I dress up as whichever character I’m playing, whenever I’m playing. Even in Text based MUDs I wear a black jumpsuit adorned with random white blocks of text (some in color!).
Hahahahahahahaha.
Kudos to you, my friend.
Well, I agree. So is there any hope of actually getting MUD back into common parlance instead of this atrocity we know as MMORPG or MMO?
The only way I can see getting MMORPG or MMO replaced is if a new, highly anticipated (or not, but ends up successful anyway) game comes out and markets itself as something else. Once success is established, other companies will follow suit, as we’ve already seen.
I thought the “new” term was MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game)?
MMOG is pretty crap as well. How do you pronounce that one? Muh-Mawg? Also, the whole “Massively” part just makes no sense and it not even close to quantifiable.
POW sounds silly, everybody knows it stands for Prisoner of War. MUD sounds silly too - dirt.
and i think it’s a waste of time trying to come up with acronyms. they arent really important.
i play online games: WoW, Starcraft, Dota and W3, CS, Quake, and browser games.
i think Blizzard’s “world” will become synonimous to “mmorpg” just like “shooter” is to “fps”.