Separation of MMO and RPG

First go and read this:

GamerGod

Done? Good. It's a good read.

My take on this is a simple one. When people saw MMORPG they thought "wow, a place I can go and role-play"... Unfortunately they were looking at it the wrong way. Double unfortunately this caught on and those that wanted to actually RP were left out in the cold more and more...

MMORPG's, to me, were simply extensions of CRPG's. Computer Role-Playing Games. Games where you had stats, you killed things, you leveled, and you got phat lewt. Do the quests, kill the Foozle, all is well. Role-playing here was a very literal translation of the concept. You were playing a role. Mostly, you were playing a role to kill things to get gold. The big difference that MMO's added was that you could do all of that with thousands of your closest friends.

Ah well. It's too late to try and change what people think MMORPG means. I agree at this point they should just be called MMOG's and leave it at that.

.ungawa