Is he? Let's try a little experiment.
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_game
A massively multiplayer online game (also called MMO and MMOG) is a multiplayer video game which is capable of supporting large numbers of players simultaneously. By necessity, they are played on the Internet.[1] MMOs usually have at least one persistent world, however some games differ. These games can be found for most network-capable platforms, including the personal computer, video game console, or smartphones and other mobile devices.
MMOGs can enable players to cooperate and compete with each other on a large scale, and sometimes to interact meaningfully with people around the world. They include a variety of gameplay types, representing many video game genres.
.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Massively+multiplayer+online+game
massively multiplayer online game: any online video game in which a player interacts with a large number of other players.
.
ANd an interesting article:
http://internetgames.about.com/od/mmorpgs/a/whatisammog.htm
"Although "massively multiplayer online game" (MMOG) was an obscure term at the turn of the century, these days it's applied haphazardly to an increasingly broad spectrum of games with multiplayer capabilities. No doubt, World of Warcraft has raised the profile of MMOGs to a point where everyone seems to want to jump on the massively multiplayer bandwagon. But are all these games, even those which use a lot of "instancing," really MMOGs? While there is no concrete definition of MMOG to resolve the issue, I think the proper use of the term MMOG deserves further examination.
.
A Brief History of "Massively"
The term MMOG or MMORPG first appeared around 1995, and was used to describe games like Interactive Magic's Air Warrior flight simulator, which allowed up to 100 pilots to take flight in the same virtual sky. A year or so later Trip Hawkins pitched 3DO's Meridian 59 as a massively multiplayer game, and it was also used to market Ultima Online, which was released in 1997. The term didn't really become widespread until EverQuest took off several years later and it was clear that graphical MMOGs were here to stay. The acrynom is often abbreviated as "MMO," and several different genres of game have been adapted to the concept, including roleplaying games (RPG), first-person shooters (FPS) and real-time strategy games (RTS).
.
How Many is Massive?
One common characteristic of MMOGs is that they allow you to play along with large numbers of other people in the same game environment. As usual, the devil is in the details, because not everyone agrees on what "playing" or "large numbers" really mean, and evolving technology has made these terms even more difficult to define.
.
While play usually involves some sort of combat, it could, in theory, also include things like trading and negotiating. Even if a game caps the number of players that can engage in a single battle, there is rarely a limit on how many players can partake in economic aspects of the game. However, I don't think this really does justice to what is meant by massively multiplayer. By this account, a game like Battlefield 2, which offers a persistent stats system even though matches have relatively small player limits, might be considered a MMOG. Similarly, if thousands of people are competing for a high score in a game of Pac-man, that doesn't make Pac-man a massively multiplayer game.
.
Another thing to consider is that, text-based games excluded, there are limits to how many players existing technology can handle. With a few exceptions, graphical games split their user-base across a number of different servers, also referred to as "shards" or "realms," each of which is a complete version of the game world. The population limits of servers vary from game to game, but they frequently support several thousand players each.
.
World of Warcraft is one game where everyone on a realm could all decide to congregate in a single zone, and there have been in-game events, such as the opening of the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj, that brought very large numbers of players into one place. In these situations, the lag inevitably escalates, information gets lost, characters near your own stop getting rendered, and the server begins to drop connections or crashes altogether. The problem is that each additional character in the area increases the amount of data that must be sent to everyone exponentially - it's only a matter of time before this overwhelms the system.
.
While a number of games have demonstrated that it is possible to have hundreds of active players in a single area, many games make an effort to spread players out in order to minimize lag. This is often done with instancing, which I'll discuss in a moment.
.
Obviously, it's not easy to quantify massively multiplayer, but I think we have to consider games like Everquest and World of Warcraft paradigms of the genre. The key is that they consist mostly of persistent zones that are open to every player on the server and no other artificial population cap is imposed. While playing in these zones, you could theoretically encounter any other player on the server. Eve Online is noteworthy for allowing their entire player base to participate in one world with no separate shards, although zones within the game do have a population cap.
.
Instancing
The use of multiple copies of a game area, created on demand for groups of players, is known as "instancing." Instancing allows two or more groups of players to work their way through identical areas, but each is in a private copy of that area, so the separate groups will not see, or interfere, with each other. The vast majority of MMOGs employ instancing to some extent, including WoW, which uses it for Dungeons and Raids.
.
Aside from reducing lag, one of the biggest advantages to instancing is that it allows players to pursue portions of the game's content without interference from other players. A boss in a crowded zone could be difficult to kill simply because everyone else jumps it before you get a chance. Instancing effectively alleviates this problem, providing each group a copy of the boss to kill in their own time. It also makes it easier to put dynamic environments in an online game.
.
Instancing is nothing particularly new, going back at least as far as Anarchy Online, but Guild Wars is notable for making much more extensive use of it than earlier games. All areas outside of cities are limited to a single group of up to 8 players, or instanced PvP matches that can involve several groups of 8.
.
Guild Wars in an interesting example because, although the developer has never called it a MMORPG, it's frequently classified as a MMORPG by the media. While you can trade and form groups in well-populated cities, you're never actually playing the game with more than a handful of people. On the other hand, games like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights, which support up to 64 players on a single server, are rarely regarded as massively multiplayer.
.
If you've played a variety of online RPGs, you know that playing through an instance with a fixed group of players is dramatically different than playing through an open zone such as the Barrens in World of Warcraft. Being able to meet other players as you're questing and group with them on the fly is a long way from forming a group through the chat window beforehand. Being saved from a mob at the last second by a random player passing by, or being unexpectedly attacked by players from an enemy faction, for example, are things that typically cannot happen in instances. There are lots of good things to be said for instances, but they tend to detract from the massively multiplayer feel of a game.
.
Final Thoughts
It could be that we're not far from calling every multiplayer online game massively multiplayer. In my view, if I can't potentially engage in core gameplay with over a hundred other players, it doesn't really qualify as massive. Clearly, there are games that sit close to this line, and the next advance in technology may force me to revise my opinion. Perhaps we'll find some more precise terms in the future to describe the distinctions that become evident as you move from one type of graphical online world to another."
.
(and marketing)
