PMOG

There’s a good article on Justin Hall’s PMOG game at MIT Tech Review. PMOG (Passively Multiplayer Online Game) is a browser-based game that sits on top of your web experience. Player can design quests by linking routes through other web sites and placing ‘mines’. Players earn XP for completing quests, and can ally themselves with roles and tribes – just like a normal RPG (Role Playing Game). Alice and I funded some early research for PMOG when we were at the BBC, and its good to see the project up and running in beta now. I’ve been playing around with it for the last month or so, and its great fun, especially the first time you find a mine on a site!

The idea of layering gameplay over everyday routines and behaviour is an interesting one, particularly if it can encourage people to explore, collaborate, share and learn more about their environments, online or offline. Jane McGonigal spoke about this in her recent SXSW keynote, but the idea has been around for a while. The origin of popular photo site Flickr was GameNeverEnding, a precursor of PMOG that built a similar game dynamic in which users were encouraged to create their own objects and leave notes for players all over the web. After a couple of Betas, GNE was abandoned, and some of the underlying code became Flickr. You can still see .gne at the end of some Flickr URLs as the last evidence of this legacy code.

New ARGS

Lots of really interesting looking ARGs launched this week. The first up is from SixToStart for Penguin, and is a really nice experiment in story-telling using Google Maps. We Tell Stories will feature 6 stories told via clicking on Google Map tags. After a pretty linear start, it begins to fragment, and finally leads off into different spaces. I won’t give out a spoiler, but look for the info at the end that takes the story into a completely different realm…

Next up is a new Nokia ARG, for those of us old-skool enough to remember the first NokiaGame. Haven’t had a chance to play with it yet and it looks pretty straight-up marketing, but will investigate more later

Finally – emergency subnet. Looks a bit ARG by numbers to me, with lots of the cliches of the genre – flickery, degraded film, psuedo-dystopian political paranoia, and suspiciously attractive protagonists sending out help messages to the ether… Beautiful design, though.

Links roundup

Until we get our delicious feed automatically posting here, here’s some interesting links related to education and teens:

Alltop’s teen blog aggregator
Interesting aggregation of teen blog sites. US-focused, and also very much biased towards girls sites. Are there no blogs for teenage boys?

Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson at SXSW
Writeup of two heavy-hitting thinkers’ session at the Austin geek-fest

YPulse: SXSW and what gamers want
More SXSW coverage (this is just a ploy to justify blagging a trip there next year) with some added insight into what Gamers want

IssueLab Close-up – Youth Media
Huge aggregation of non-profit (ie free!) youth media research. US based, but still some good stuff there

AlleyKatzz Secrets
Slightly odd and a little bit depressing US teens site encouraging girls to share their secrets anonymously. We must have been pitched variants on this idea about 100 times in the last year… See also Anastasia from Ypulse’s similar proposal

ARG stats roundup

Cross Media Specialist Christy Dena has written up some excellent notes on stats for ARGS on her blog. She’s included all the major ARGS of the last few years, including The Beast, I Love Bees, Perplexcity, The Lost Experience, World Without Oil and Regenesis. This is a really good and valuable roundup, and shows some interesting patterns.

Marketing seems to be key to massive take-up – the biggest ARGS are those commissioned for a major product launch (The Beast/I Love Bees/The H3ist) or alongside a TV show (The Lost Experience/Heroes). This probably reflects the super-sized budgets that these ARGS have compared to more home-brewed games such as Meigeist or Lockjaw. There are only a couple of ’stand-alone’ ARGS that have achieved any kind of scale – EA’s Majestic from 2001 (with a reported $10m budget – yikes!) and MindCandy’s PerplexCity.  This is one of the biggest issues within the ARG world at the moment – are they destined to just be funky marketing tactics, or are they the first truly new entertainment format to come along since the growth of the web?

Jane McGonigal on Happiness, Gaming and ARGs

Dan Hon (founder of UK ARG company SixToStart) has written up some fantastic notes on Jane McGonigal’s SXSW keynote, for those of us not lucky enough to attend the geek-fest in Austin, Texas.

Its a fantastic keynote, looking at the kind of feedback and emotions players get from virtual games, and how we might design more real-world interactions that share those qualities. In particular, Jane has been researching recent academic thinking about how we define happiness in our society, and what motivates people in their everyday lives. Here’s an excerpt from Dan’s write-up:

“Happiness is the new capital. If you want someone to value your service, eperience, you need to explicitly generate a positive experience for them. Happiness doesn’t mean what it used to – some people do define it as a warm fuzzy thing still, but I’m hear to say that it’s not a warm puppy, although I have a picture of my puppy coming up in 20 slides, so we will extract some, but this warm fuzziness is not what I want to talk about. I’ve been researching this for a while, so the 4 key principles that have come out of all of this peer reviewed research:

1. satisfying work to do
2. the experience of being good at something
3. time spent with people we like
4. the chance to be a part of something bigger

Not money. Not even necessarily fun. What blew my mind was the realisation that nothing gives you these four things in higher or better quality than games. Games given you satisfying work to do, designed for you to be successful, multiplayer games spent with people you like, and games give you a chance to be a part of something bigger.”

Really inspiring stuff, and light years away from most thinking on ARGs and games in general. Although if this whets your appetite, its worth checking out Amy Jo Kim’s presentation from the 2006 Etech conference – Putting The Fun Into Functional.

Bow Street Runner Ep 2 is up!

On Thursday, we uploaded the second episode of Bow Street Runner the point-and-click adventure we’ve commissioned to accompany the City Of Vice TV series. We’ve responded to some feedback and bug reports from the preview of the first episode, so it now plays really smoothly and its a little easier to save the harlot!

A new episode will go up every Thursday, and you’ll get a unique code when you complete an episode that saves your progress in the game and your esteem levels. So go there now and get playing, and please let us know what you think.