The comic company behind Spider-Man and the X-Men tells us more about Marvel's two upcoming massively multiplayer online games and why they are for.

In the near future, after you've seen Marvel's upcoming "Captain America" movie (in 2011) and "Avengers" movie (in 2012) — when all of that is out of the way — you should play Marvel's massively multiplayer online game.

Expect that to happen in 2012, because that's the sequence of events Marvel's president of worldwide consumer products, Simon Philips, told my Splashpage Blog colleague Rick Marshall in a recent interview.

"It sounds like a long way away, but it's not," he said. "We've got to create, together with [game publisher] Gazillion, that environment that is going to be a totally immersive experience and a perpetual storytelling experience as well." Philips said that he sees MMOs as "the next generation of storytelling."