What will the future of MMOs be? What a game needs to excel in the genre? Immediately after the Churchill Club Panel Discussion Gamespot caught up with Raph Coster,CCO of SOE, taking more on traditionally connected gaming.

GameSpot: Let‘s start with an easy one. You said that you pretty much live in these worlds, these massively multiplayer online games. What exactly is the MMO to you today?

Raph Koster: Is that an easy one? (laughs) What is the MMO today? MMOs to me are a platform and we deliver games in them. Right now, we usually do the one game per [world] but I don‘t think it needs to be that way. I think a lot of the trend has been to deliver more games within one world. Crafting is now a viable sub-game and a lot of the games‘ economics are coming in--like people playing arbitrage and all kinds of things like that. To me, MMOs are a platform. They‘re a place that offers entertainment, where you can put games and community and socialization and all kinds of other things. That‘s what the MMO is to me.

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