Personally, I enjoy your site immensely, but my response here may seem a bit critical. Its meant constructively of course. Just a caveat before reading....
I find your definition of MMO a little constricting. In reality, looking at the acronym, nothing can be inferred about the qualities or features of an "MMO" other than it has a large scale of players and is online. It speaks to nothing about how your game play experience is presented. Character progression (see Borderlands section) and persistence are non-factors. I think the media definition for these games is often wrong. For instance trying to relabel RPG character progression as MMO character progression is a fallacy. Perhaps the only reason for this oft made mistake is the fact that the earliest of these MMOs were RPGs. Having been around this genre since its earlier days (1997 with UO), you never saw anyone doing anything but RPGs. I do not think that is good reason to start constricting the definition of what an MMO is. RPGs were just a very easy integration into this type of game. Now I'm not trying to convince anyone here that halo or any old game with a matchmaking service is an MMO, but I can't fault anyone for thinking in as broad a terms as those.
To me, MMO is perhaps the wrong marketing term to describe these kinds of games, at least from the perspective of persistence. Back in the day, another term we used to describe these games was PSW or persistent state world. Now that term obviously talks to persistence. To me it is a more apt term that you can more legitimately infer things about. I.E. its a persistent state WORLD, and a world has lots of people, so right there you can infer it is something having alot of people on it. Overall I think its just hard to label things and I just want you all to think a little more carefully when trying to pin down exactly what an MMO is. Personally, I think the term MMO now is being used to describe any game or service that enables you to connect to a large and diverse set of gamers to play a particular game, and honestly I am ok with that definition. It is a different approach than the old stick 1k people on a server and let them figure everything out on their. Not saying that that model is outdated either, because that kind of sandbox game is one of my personal preferences....
At the end of the day though, why is this even important? Even in a "true" MMO (in the traditional sense) like WOW, yes you have a "persistent" world with "massive" amounts of players. But the majority of that world is barely used or seen due to the ease of travel (teleports, portals etc), and common points of focus (Ironforge or whatever the popular new gathering place city with Lichking was). There is alot of hardware out there supporting a world where the only thing enjoying it is the AI of the monsters running around out there. Not to mention the fact that in reality the world is self is very static and unchanging. Not to mention the fact that you don't do anything with anymore than 5, 10 or 25 people anyways.... so really, the fact that i can run around in this huge, unused world with a thousand people that I cant truly interact with to do anything worthwhile... well it just makes me think that the definition of what an MMO is unimportant. Having fun in whatever the game creators offer you is what is important =)
Is it Getting Harder to Define What Makes an MMO?
Today's market is bursting at the seams with games riding the coattails of the MMO craze. As the success of games like World of Warcraft rose, publishers ran wild with the "MMO" tag, persistent world or not.
As we mentioned in our original report about Need For Speed World, social integration—both proprietary and via third-party sites like Facebook—is one of EA's big selling points for the racing-sim MMO. Other upcoming MMOs are placing a similar emphasis on social networking, and older MMOs like World of Warcraft are being retro-fitted to offer the same features (via Battle.net's next incarnation in Cataclysm).
We're also beginning to see how MMOs have influenced the development of other gaming genres like first-person shooters, regardless of platform. An example of this trend is ZAM's brief coverage of Borderlands in late-2009. This popular FPS-RPG hybrid didn't even try to capitalize on the "MMO brand," yet we devoted two in-depth previews to the game because of its strong MMO-styled character progression and cooperative online gameplay.
There's no question that Borderlands and similar video games aren't MMOs, but this new breed of progression-oriented online shooters and strategy games exemplifies the influence that the MMO industry has; players want more rewards for their investment. They want tangible recognition that the hours they've spent grooming their in-game avatars wasn't all for nothing. And they want to share that accomplishment with other players online, whether it's in a co-op first-person shooter skirmish like Borderlands or a 4 vs. 4 real-time strategy battle like StarCraft 2.
As the landscape of online gaming evolves, so does its previous boundaries and markers. MMO and RPG fans are gravitating towards many of these new games, despite the lack of a true persistent world. Will the community have to update and fine-tune the criteria of a "real" MMO once again, or is the requirement of a persistent world still as essential as it was a decade ago?
It's not an exact science anymore; we can't pigeon-hole every new release into the same distinct categories that we used to. A FPS isn't always just a FPS, and a RTS or RPG game isn't always just that—in fact, many fans would defy the self-appointed "MMO" title that many of today's publishers give their games.
Here at ZAM, we're still relying on the "persistent world factor" as the most-definitive benchmark to qualify a video game as an MMO. But obviously, that hasn't stopped us from covering occasional titles that we think our audience will appreciate in some capacity. To some extent, we rely on our own experience as MMO fans to determine what kind of games our fellow players will enjoy, like our brief coverage of BioWare's smash-hit RPG, Dragon Age: Origins.
Mostly though, we rely on what you—our readership and dedicated forum communities—express an interest in, whether it's a "true" MMO or not. Nine times out of 10, you can't go wrong when you're following the ebb and flow of public interest, even if that means stepping outside of your home playing field every once in awhile. Will the lines that separate MMOs and "non-MMOs" become clearer as time goes on?
Probably not; this is an exciting time in the (hopefully) never-ending evolution of video games, despite the jokes we crack about social gaming in Facebook, or our reservations about where the industry might be heading. Many of today's next-generation video games are benefitting from the best parts of the MMO paradigm. Meanwhile, there's still a vast player base for the traditional style of "persistent-world gaming" that we've come to know and love, as evidenced by the continued success of yesterday's games.