The Daily Grind: Do MMOs belong on cellphones?

Wow I can see the rise in car accidents now... Not bad enough how many people get in trouble just talking on their phone while driving... but now playing games? great :\

The idea of playing an mmo as they currently exist on a phone is pure lunacy. However, the idea of using a phone to have some kind of interaction with a game world is going to arrive very soon indeed. What if you could change what skills you were learning, be updated when an auction item sold, access your in-game mail .etc. There's loads of stuff you could be doing via a phone, and certain genres games will increasingly be designed to be 'interacted' with across different devices in different ways.

I could see in game mail, or auction monitoring, but beyond that I'll pass. I think playing an MMO requires too much keyboard interaction to be squished down to a cell phone. Plus I think any serious guild would boot you for attempting a raid via cell phone.

I've been going on this for a couple of years now to my friends -- I feel that MMOs on a handset would be a great idea, but only as a companion game. For example, anyone remember the PocketStation for the Playstation? Well, Final Fantasy VIII had a little mini-game built for the PocketStation where you play a little chocobo in search of items for your in-game party. When you plug the PocketStation back into your Playstation, you recieve the items your chocobo had collected for you. A similar mini-game was also included with the Dreamcast version of Skies of Arcadia if you used the VMU. Something like this, I think, would be a great idea.
Allow one to craft items via mobile phone, do mini dungeon crawls as your character's "pet", guild chat, monitor the in-game auction, or various other side-games anyone can think of.
If one were to design an entire MMO for mobile phone, I think the game would have to be exclusively for mobile phone. That way, the game limitations (and potential problems) are known and factorable into its design.