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.
