Online gaming is one of those phenomena that comes about primarily because so many people seem to want it to happen. There wasn't always this clamor over wanting things to be accessible over the 'Net. In fact, long story short, it's what caused the Dot Com Bubble to burst: nobody understood the value of doing things online, so it took a long time for nationwide acceptance to congeal. Part of the problem was the bottleneck of 56k modem speeds -- you can't really appreciate the power of the Internet with anything less than full broadband -- but it was mainly the difficulty of pushing a New Idea over on people who fear change, i.e. the general public.

Once it became clear that the 'Net was a Good Thing, more and more services began to include it as a bullet point. Game consoles began selling broadband peripherals to allow gamers to play together, which of course PC users had been doing for a while. Arguably the biggest recipient of this newfound connectivity was the MMO. Suddenly, not only could you fight other players no matter where they were in the world, but you could also adventure with your friends in cooperative play, receive new content through updates, download useful add-ons, and sample the ever-widening genre as more and more games become available.

Now it seems that "MMO" has become somewhat of a buzzword among marketing types -- I can't tell you how many game invites I've been sent by publishers looking for a review who claim that their game is an MMO, when really it's just online. They might even offer multiplayer, but unless we're talking about hundreds of concurrent players, it's not quite "massively".

Yet it continues to be used to drum up hype for whatever's coming down the pike next. So at least in the minds of these marketers, the future is online multiplayer at the very least. But can every type of game find a way to incorporate connectivity in a meaningful way? Look at what happened to Cyan and the Myst franchise. With five iterations of the classic single-player exploration fantasy under their belt, the multiplayer portion of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst became Myst Online: Uru Live, which limped along for a while with a devoted but small fanbase, then shut its doors earlier this year. Clearly, this was not a product that needed the transition to online play.

So what does work?