Kids these days with their iBerries and Google Mandroids, they’ve got it easy. Back in the day, if you wanted to log into an MMO, you had to dial-up the internet. That’s right, you had to manually call an internet and ask it to come to your house so that you could check your newsgroups. You certainly didn’t have an internet in a “sell-phone”. But now that they are mass-producing tiny, portable internets, you can watch a funny cat video from anywhere! But portable internets aren’t just for sharing the latest “you might be a redneck if” jokes, no sir.
The potential for interconnectivity between mobile devices and persistent-world games opens up a world of options. From simply showing off your pimped out character to your friends, to placing, monitoring and bidding on in-game auctions and chatting with online friends, you can fill the last few untainted crevices of your life with MMO goo. World of Warcraft already has an armory application for the iPhone, but it lacks any in-game interaction. Our wild prediction is that it will eventually be possible to rout in-game messages, mail, guild and personal alerts, and other information directly to your phone number, at least until 2017 when Apple develops the iMplant – the world’s first brainular phone.
As for mobile MMOs themselves, expect to see a greater emphasis on GPS-functions, the likely addition of voice chat, and an attempted increase in sophistication which will fail miserably, as playing a game that requires prolonged attention — and a stable internet connection — on a mobile device still won’t be pleasant.
Yes, the next ten years will hold a lot of exciting things for the three percent of us who survive the mole-man uprising. Social interaction is going to become a staple of many games whether you like it or not, and for those who don’t, there’s always solitaire.
