I came across this the other day when browsing through friends’ Twitter profiles. As if Twitter didn’t waste enough time with publicly announcing that you were taking a dump (a tweet that, mercificully, neither I nor anyone else that I “follow” has felt the need to share… as yet) I happened to come across something called PMOG on the page of one Jennatar.
PMOG stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game and I guess it’s one of those Web 2.0 thingies that you always hear people rabbiting on about. I was intrigued by the title, to be honest, so I decided to check it out.
PMOG takes the form of a Firefox extension that you install and it does all kinds of interesting things while you’re just going about your normal daily life on the Web. Firstly, you gain Datapoints for browsing websites. Secondly, players sometimes leave items on webpages including Crates, which can contain Datapoints, Mines, which cause players to lose Datapoints (and which cause Firefox to wobble around like it’s having a spaz attack), Portals, which link to another website with only a little hint about what it might be (though there are NSFW tags on ones which… well… aren’t) and some other bits and pieces.
The great thing is, these things only pop up if you’re running the PMOG toolbar, so you can make it leave you alone whenever you like. But then you’ll miss out on the mysterious portal which has appeared on your Facebook page, linking you to a video of, I don’t know, some dancing kittens or something.
It’s an interesting idea and it’s already made me check out a number of sites I’d heard of but never got around to investigating in any great detail.
Crap. As if I need another excuse to waste time on the Web.
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To correct a point: I am told that some people are even considering this kind of thing as “Web 3.0”, where things like reporting on user profiles and day-to-day competition is a key thing. So there you go. Web 3.0? Where does it end?
It ends with Web 4.0: Super Hyper Turbo Revival. I kind of like the concept of this. I won’t start hanging around Attention Whore Central(Twitter) but I might have to scour the depths of the net to see what else I’m missing out on.
Your final sentence was my thought exactly. Although, man, what a great mash of ideas. We should think of ways to plant “listen to the Squadron of Shame!” marketing blurbs on porn sites. Imagine the explosion of listeners! Of course, they’ll only listen once after they realize there’s no nasty business about.
On the contrary. I think there’s a big market crossover between porn and old games. Possibly.