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When Bungie gave its online sci-fi shooter Destiny its gameplay debut on the Sony stage at E3 last week, there were a number of telling moments, but my favourite came early on. A dropship deposited studio founder Jason Jones' character before us (we were viewing the game through story lead Joe Staten's eyes). There was a slightly awkward pause and Jones chuckled. Then his character, a hunter clad in lightweight armour and cloak, busted out a cheerful wave and jogged over.'Emote' animations like this wave crop up in all kinds of games, but for millions they will be redolent of one genre in particular - massively multiplayer role-playing games - and perhaps one game above all - Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Their inclusion in Destiny is theoretically trivial but ripe with meaning. They extend your personality into the game world, and your interaction with other players beyond pure gameplay. They help you make friends and influence people. They're inherently social.
Destiny's publisher Activision, Blizzard's other half, is anxious to avoid the term "MMO" for all sorts of reasons, most of them good ones. The acronym has become indelibly associated with an ageing breed of slow-paced, real-time RPG on PCs, while Destiny presents itself as a console first-person shooter in the mould of Bungie's own Halo. And MMOs' name is mud in the games industry after years of hideously expensive, failed attempts to match Blizzard's work in a genre that - designed as it was around the low speeds and high latency of 1990s dial-up internet connections - is fast approaching its sell-by date.
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