What if everyone in the world could play a game at the same time?

Game of War: Fire Age is an ambitious mobile game that wants to make that prospect a reality — and, most notably, to enable every player to understand what the others are saying while they play.

The game’s most impressive feature is an instantaneous translation of text-based online chat. If someone writes “MDR” in French (for “mort de rire,” or “dying of laughter”), an English-speaking player sees it as “LOL.” Machine Zone, the company behind the game, says it will release Game of War in Apple’s App Store sometime this month.

Since the 1990s, a single, giant, global game has been the alluring promise of what are called “massively multiplayer” online games. By the middle of the last decade, at the peak of virtual-world fever, Edward Castronova, an economist at Indiana University, warned that we were facing the equivalent of an emigration crisis — the prospect that hundreds of millions of people would be leaving this world for digital ones, where they would spend the vast bulk of their time and money.

And yet, while these games have indeed proved to be immensely popular — World of Warcraft still has more than eight million subscribers — they have, for the most part, failed to follow through on the conceit that they are enormous global spaces. Nearly all massively multiplayer games would be better called decently large multiplayer games. To begin with, the millions of subscribers for a single title are divided among millions of computer servers called shards that create a multiverse of virtual worlds that do not intersect or interact with one another. For most of these games, only several thousand players compete alongside one another at a time in a single virtual place.