Video Games Encyclopedia

Massively multiplayer online social games focus on socialization instead of objective-based gameplay. There is a great deal of overlap in terminology with “online communities” and “virtual worlds”. It is technically an MMOSG or Casual Multiplayer Online (CMO) by definition, though its stated goal was to realize the concept of the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. Instead of being based around combat, one could say that it was based around the creation of virtual objects, including models and scripts.
Because of maturing of Adobe Flash, many browser based Casual MMOs have begun to spring up.