The Rise of the Casual MMOG

Are casual game offerings akin to Pogo.com and Club Penguin going to evolve into the MMOGs of the future? Nick Fortugno, creator of the ever-popular Diner Dash, seems to think we're already half way there. Worlds In Motion has a summary of his speech at IMGDC, where he offered a comparison of casual gamers and MMOG players. "When casuals think about MMOs, they think of Club Penguin, Fortugno continued. 'What they’re really thinking about, though, is the huge amount of money Disney paid for it. That was kind of a big deal. Investors, especially, think about that. Pogo.com is the other thing casuals think of; it's been around for years, happily puttering along. It is considered an MMO in the casual game space. Other examples are Habbo, Webkinz, Puzzle Pirates, Parking Wars, Kart Rider and Audition.'"

I'm not convinced that casual gamers are really the people to go to for a definition of "massively multiplayer." I can remember a time, some years after the initial thrill of EverQuest wore off, when quite a few games didn't want to be labelled MMOs because of the grind that is associated with the term. Now that World of Warcraft is making fistfuls of money, every game wants to be massively multiplayer again. And whatever became of all those plain old multiplayer games we used to play? At the end of the day, I maintain that competing for a high-score in a single-player game does not make it multiplayer, and having a chat window open next to a 4-player game of Hearts does not make Hearts a massively multiplayer game. Unfortunately, the term is thrown around so haphazardly these days that it's become almost meaningless.