Are MMOs fulfilling their potential?

The problem here is you created a thread based on a subjective measure. There is no objective measure of what "full potential" means for an MMO, or any consumer product really.

MMOs are entertainment. No media or method of entertainment lives up to full potential, because the term means different things to different people.

For example: read any internet movie review.. read the reviews of the viewers.... one says something like "this movie sux..I'd give it a 0 of 5 if I could"... yet the very next one says.. "best movie evar!! I'd give it a 10 of 5 if I could." Then we have the full range of variations in between.

Now go read an MMO player review site.

Notice a pattern with the human beings here?

So.. in the simplest analysis.. NO.. MMOs will never fulfill their potential in players eyes. EVER. Some players, yes. All players no. And what one player thinks is the best thing since sliced bread.. another player will barf it up and stomp on it.

okay, this is blatantly false. The very first games every created by **** sapiens were not created for fun. They were among other things created to teach children how to hunt. And I cannot believe that h o m o is censored but not homosapiens when spelled exactly that way.

Merely pointing out that Turing is widely considered the father of Computer Science AND Artificial Intelligence. Asimov is HARDLY to the same level -- mainly because his focus was on philosophy and the morality of AI. Many of Asimov's ideas came from Turing himself -- and Turing was, in turn, influenced by the moral questions posed by Asimov.

They also flip coins through fingers. But they don't see it as fun, they see it as work because if it's fun, they will fail later. It's fascinating. When you view something fun as work, you tend to dread doing it and become negative, but you're more focused on the tasks. But you view work as fun, you end up doing something completely different from what work you set out to do, but you're happy with the result anyway. It's weirdly marvelous.

Correction... the very first primative games were to teach children to RUN! To survive from the big bad predators. THEN... you can learn to hunt what you can survive from.

and I feel forced to mention that none of these questions would be asked if humans didn't have five fingers (thumbs included) and didn't create the abacus in the first place to count things that exceeded the number of fingers and toes they had in total.

Well, of course. Lets try to be a little less literally-minded here...

Both wrong. Those weren't games. They were known as "survival". I mean, how bored would one would have been to think "Hey, we spend our whole lives being chased by big cats and birds and stuff. Wonder what it'd feel like to BE that big cat and chase people around?"

And that's how Tag was created.

when you get that far back into unrecorded history... the problem is... it is in fact all unrecorded. We cannot know which came first, teaching them to run from predators or teaching them to hunt predators. But seeing as how we evolved from omnivorous apes, I assume that the running was already instinctual on some level and did not in fact need to be taught. Rather it is the throwing of rocks or other specified objects at hostile targets that in fact needed to be taught.

and obviously you just disqualified yourself from any discussion on anthropology.