The term MMO came later i think (?) used to describe the 3D worlds of EQ and DAoC so although both (MMO and MUD) are technically massively multiplayer the connotations of these terms is more about the 2D / 3D of the graphics than the amount of players.

I play Savage and Savage 2 which are commonly played with 25 or 32 players per team (though can be played with less, perhaps as few as 3) i have seen servers with caps of 128 which would be 64 per team, but i would not count these large matches as being massively multiplayer because they are just matches, short games lasting at most a few hours.

Just like Brian says above the terms are reletive to the times and perspectives change and its all to do with player numbers not the size of the world, Morrowind for example is a massive single player RPG with comparable size / scale game worlds to a MMO game but as it is offline it cant have the O and its single player so no MM either heh the fact that millions of people might play such a game is irrelevant, they are each playing their own game by themselves – same with battlenet or whatever.

All of these terms though are just words we use to help communicate what we are talking about, if you say mmorpg to someone they know you mean a game like WoW if you say mmofps its a game like planetside.

So could say that im excited about the new Sci Fi MMOFPS and everyone would know what i was talking about (unless they are 12 and then they might think that FPS meant Free Player Shooter, i can only guess this is because they are too young to remember Side and Vertical scrolling shooters, so they dont get why shooter games would be called first person and why that is a big deal, they dont know any other kind! – athough there are still platformer / shoot ‘em ups that are often 3rd person
I dunno, these are the explainations i give to myself so i can think of them as young and niave in an aww thats cute way instead of being angry and thinking they are idiots)

if you are looking for an alternative to mmo you could perhaps say persistant world, as although this has a different meaning (in that the world continues to be there even after you have left) it goes hand in hand with being massively multiplayer but this could lead to some confusion as people may wonder why you are saying that instead of mmo.

A game like battlefield does not have a persistant world, you get a new version of the world each game wtih all the bullet holes patched up and the vehicles put neatly back in their starting positions.

Actually while im rambling and pondering these terms, theoretically if you had a big enough house or something with a massive lan network you could load up a game like wow and play it on lan then it wouldnt be online anymore and would be a MMLANRPG but as youd all have to be in the same place to play it you probably wouldnt really need the term.

Down the road as technology advances and games like battlefield are on the scale of planetside and planetside scale games are bigger again you will probably have new terms like SuperMMOFPS, but knowing what advertisers are like, this term will be brought in prematurely as a selling point which will lead us to need an even bigger term for when we really do have bigger games and then we will end up in a right mess with something like: EpicallySuperMassivelyMultiplayerFree2PlayPay4AdvantageOnlineFirstPersonShooterRealTimeStratagy+TacticsRolePlayingGames. phew, be thankful things are still pretty simple! lol

And years after that you will be able to trace it all back here to me having coined these future terms ahead of time

Geoff

I try to be careful in my terminology. I purposely try to always use MMORPG when talking about wow, rom, etc…

I use MMO and MMOG interchangeably for any online game that allows more than one person to play, but excluding MMORPG, MMOFPS, etc..

Usually if the games a bit ambiguous or doesn’t label itself anything.

But that is history, not really current perspectives like you give.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-User_Dungeon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_massively_multiplayer_online_role-playing_games

As I’ve heard it, Raph Koster takes partial blame (or credit, perhaps) for coining the phrase “massively multiplayer”. This term was intended to excludes online games where the limit was 8-16 players on a single server, like most FPS games. Games like Meridian 59 counted as “massively multiplayer” because the servers could hold more than 16 players at once. (But, perspectives change and now that larger games host thousands of players at once, some people try to exclude smaller games from the MMO category; often these people try to show that the game they played first was the first “real” MMO.) Note that the first M is “Massively” not “massive”. “Massively” is a modifier to “Multiplayer”, indicating that there are a lot of people playing the game (with a cap higher than 16 or 32 or whatever). Size of the world has nothing to do with the definition.

You’re wrong that MMOs are a genre. Genre indicates either setting (fantasy) or gameplay (RPG). It might be better to think of MMOs as a medium, an alternative to “consoles” or “PC” or “handheld”. You could take a game concept and put it on different media, but the limitations and strengths of each one changes how the game would play. An RPG on the consoles (like popular Final Fantasy franchises) is different than one on a handheld system (consider the Final Fantasy Legend games on the Game Boy). An MMORPG is a different beast altogether, something people on here are probably familiar with.