Genetically Modified Gaming

That's the lesson to those who aren't making MMOs is that you should also be watching this space. Amazing stuff is happening here. Player retention and the science of addiction is being expanded upon in innovative, groundbreaking ways; new business models are emerging and undergoing their baptisms of fire; and fundamental questions about human interactions within game-playing worlds are being answered, and before anyone has even thought to ask them. Even if your game is nothing like an MMO, you owe it to yourself to be watching carefully.

What, then, is the lesson to those who are making MMOs - or who aspire to doing so?

Basically, it's this - that while we're all talking about how to bring MMO games in new directions, how to break out of the swords-and-sandals mould and drag new audiences into the massively multiplayer ecosystem, Infinity Ward has quietly (and perhaps unintentionally) gone and actually done it, in a small but vitally important way.

The wider gaming market has come to understand that you can't attract new audiences without making radical changes to the definition of videogames - hence SingStar, Wii Fit and their ilk. Equally, the MMO market needs to come around to the idea that you can't pull in serious new audiences by re-skinning World of Warcraft - and that not every successful MMO is even going to be recognisable as an MMO.

The technology which now exists to enable online, massively multiplayer gaming is astonishing. Developers are working with a level of network and server capacity, not to mention CPU and GPU power on the client machines, that they would barely have dared to dream of when the likes of Meridian 59 and Ultima Online launched - and I refuse to believe that the existing model (Quests, Grinding, Auction House, Instances) is the only way to leverage all of that power to create a social, addictive gaming experience.

What this industry should be striving for isn't to become the next World of Warcraft - it's to become a game equally as successful as World of Warcraft, but whose Venn diagram of players has as little crossover with Blizzard's opus as possible. Given what we've seen in recent years in this market, nobody should be shy of innovation - because it's perfectly obvious that slavish copying of the market leader is just as likely to result in utter commercial disgrace. Reinvention and rethinking of the genre and the medium may actually be a lower-risk prospect - now there's something you don't hear very often in the games industry.

I firmly believe that MMOs point the way to the future of videogames - but that doesn't mean that every game in future will be an MMO. In fact, rather like point-and-click adventure games, I suspect that the MMO genre as we know it now is doomed to become little more than a tiny niche, of interest only to die-hard enthusiasts. Just as point-and-click adventures handed over the reins to a host of new games that took their core mechanisms and made them work in new contexts and settings, the science and philosophy of design which has been learned with MMOs will be imparted to whole new generations of games. COD4 is only the beginning. After years of separate evolution, it's time for the DNA of massively multiplayer games to spread into the wild.