Massively has an interview snippet collection up, asking a variety of developers to give their opinions on the word MMO. Ravious @ Kill Ten Rats has chimed in too.

Among the other insights, Ryan Dancey at CCP (EVE Online) has the straightforward take, that MMO is just a moniker for a genre of online games:

“It’s a great term because it’s not confusing. It doesn’t make any sense (a massively multiplayer online what?), but as a term of art it encompasses a meaning that is widely shared and familiar to millions of people.”

The real defining difference is not in any words that make up the acronym of MMO, but rather in persistence of data.

I think that’s the only assumption made by most developers and players alike, that these are online games where your data will be saved.

Centrally it’s character progress data (player progress for non-RPGs), but can also include economic data (currency, bank, auction houses), item data (loot, gear), etc.. I’d love to see more persistent world changing data myself, but the MMO term mocks my personal preferences, it’s not a requirement.

Purely statistical data doesn’t count if it doesn’t have a direct impact on gameplay. So while the lines will be blurring with cloud computing and whatnot, I think MMO will still encapsulate a specific sort of genre.

In the diminishing minority are a few gamers (I’m probably one of them) and developers who insist on defining “massively”, but each has a personal take that loses most of its meaning in the larger scope. Raph Koster spells this out that massive is relative.

It’s laughable to try to declare this-game-or-that feels “massively” enough for the MMO moniker, because the term is bigger than any of our personal definitions.