"Massively multiplayer online role-playing games"... could it get any more difficult to acronymize?? Well, MMORPG did it just fine for the early adopters, but now the online world has moved on... sort of. Now there are many sects dedicated to promoting their own favorite version of this original beast. Now, it all depends on whether you care if it's easy to say like a word, or if you don't mind gurgling out a slew of consonants in a row -- well, that's how I see it.
Personally, I came up with my own and started a website around it... yep, I think I originated "MassMOG" although I don't know for sure. As far as I can tell, I was the first to drop that sucker back in about late 1998. Yay for me. Feel free to use it if you want, since it's an easy word, like "MOG" but with the little "massive" twist at the beginning.
So, it's an acronym for "Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games." The term is generally accepted as referring to games with thousands (or the high hundreds) of players in the same online, persistent-state game world at the same time. The first MMORPG's were very "role-playing" in style, so the acronym/phrase worked out well, aside from how awkward it is to say. In more recent years, however, acronyms such as "MMOG" have become more popular... unless you're me, and then you're trying to say how much nicer "MassMOG" is to say, since it rolls off the tongue so nicely (mass mog). :)
Other popular/common acronyms that tend to refer to the same role-playing style of online games:
- MMO - "massively multiplayer online"... "game" is assumed, I guess.
- MPOG - "multiplayer online game".. although to me, this could easily refer to any game like Quake or Battlefield 2, which only support around 32-64 players commonly.
- MMOG - "massive multiplayer online game"... one of the better "new variants" of the genre as a whole... it doesn't matter what type of game it is, you just know it's massive and online.
- MOG - "multiplayer online game" or "massive online game" maybe. More likely, it's "multiplayer", which like MPOG, is a bit too general for me to link directly to MassMOGs, but it's another easy one to say. You'll hear it a lot in chats at the Game Developers Conference, for instance, since it rolls off the tongue nice and everyone knows what you're talking about.
