Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough

Technology advances so quickly we are better placed to implement great ideas from the past. Wii Sports is proof of this - it’s an arcade machine at home, something plenty of people wanted about five or ten years ago and is only now affordable and achievable.

The same thing applies to massively multiplayer online (roleplaying) games, over the last few years. Games like Doom, Quake and Counter Strike made online gaming a reality and MMO’s have added a layer of persistance to really give birth to the current MMO* genre.

However, whenever I play World of Warcraft or any other, similar, MMO, it doesn’t feel as natural or fun as, for example, a multiplayer FPS. Recently, thinking about how MMOs work, tracking each player and measuring achievements on the way to each level, *surveilling* you, I realised that a lot of MMOs have lost some basic elements of gameplay, the theory of fun, and replaced them with statistics. These aren’t Massively Multiplayer Online (Roleplaying) Games, they’re Massively Multiplayer Online Databases. MMO *D*

Looking at Web2, it was Web1 done right - REST, pretty urls, simplicity, cheap hosting, open source databases. The gap from Web1 to Web2 was a little over five or six years. In comparison, 2006 was pretty much the year of MMOs, so maybe five years from now MMO technology will have advanced to a point where the current main themes of dungeons, sims and sports can be ‘rebooted’. Just like Wii Sports. It’s that whole 2D metaverse idea again, 2D Snow Crash.