The term MMORPG is short for "massive multiplayer online role playing game". Role playing games first started as books and board games such as Warhammer. However they evolved to video games such as Balders Gate and WarCraft. The first traces of multplayer rpg's can be traced back to the 1970s, with non graphical online MUD games. These types of games can completely engross the player. They can take hours to play, and are not the type of games you can play for 20 minutes and stop.