  MMO Week: Genetically Modified Gaming  Thu 08 May 2008 1:00pm
GMT / 9:00am EDT / 6:00am PDT  It looks like an MMO, smells like
an MMO...but it isn't an MMO. Yet.  What was the biggest
massively multiplayer online game of 2007 - and, indeed, of 2008
so far? Ignoring the obvious answer - "World of Warcraft, again"
- I'd argue for a rather unusual answer to this question. Not
Lord of the Rings Online, not Tabula Rasa. No, to my mind, the
biggest massively multiplayer online game of 2007 was Call of
Duty 4: Modern Warfare.  Of course, in the strictest possible
sense, CoD4 isn't an MMOG. Each individual game instance holds
only a few dozen players, after all - although if you really
wanted to turn this into a pub argument, you could introduce the
fact that World of Warcraft also restricts your party size to an
absolute maximum of 25 players in its instanced dungeons.
Rather than miring ourselves in that impossible debate, though,
consider the ways in which Call of Duty 4 does resemble a
massively multiplayer ga