Category: PMOG

PMOG, or the “passively multiplayer online game” doesn’t exist any more — it became the Nethernet, then folded. This category was created when I thought it might last a bit longer than it ended up doing.

#oneaday, Day 84: Eternally Questing

Giant Bomb recently launched a quest system on their site. It rewards participants with experience points, badges and a sense of “yay” for exploring the site, looking at different pages and taking part in various activities. Some of the quests are as simple as setting up your profile. Others are more complex “puzzly” ones that require one to solve some cryptic clues about games and game culture. It’s a lot of fun, and it actually convinced me to sign up to the site and make greater use of it.

This echoes the thoughts of social game designers at GDC a while back, including Brian Reynolds from Zynga. The idea of getting Achievements for things you do in “reality”. It sounded stupid, but given the amount of fun I, and numerous others, have had with Giant Bomb’s metagame, it may not be so dumb after all.

It’s not the first time it’s been tried, either. A very long time ago I posted about a site called PMOG, or the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. This game, actually a Firefox addon that sits atop your normal browser interface and re-christened The Nethernet a while back, allows players to earn experience points, achievements and items for exploring the web. More than that, though, other players can leave stuff on web pages for others to discover. These could be malicious (bombs, which make your browser shake about a bit and cause you to lose some points) or helpful (crates with money in them). They could also be mysterious portals, which lead to random places on the web, the destinations of which are only known to the portal’s creator. It was an interesting concept let down only by the fact that it only worked in Firefox. Since Chrome came to Mac, I haven’t touched Firefox since, the Mac version not being the greatest piece of coding there ever was.

Then there’s Shuffletime, now sadly defunct – although the developers claim to be working on the “Next Big Thing”. Shuffletime was a great idea – it was a collectible card game where the cards were websites. And you only got to collect the card if you correctly answered a question about the site it was showing you against a strict time limit. It was a fantastically addictive game, and a fine way to get people looking around the web at things they wouldn’t normally. I’m sorry to see it go, but I’m sure something interesting will come out of it.

Like them or loathe them, Achievements and Trophies are here to say. And it’s entirely possible that their influence will spread out of the world of core gaming and into the collective awareness of the web at large. Let’s face it, it’s always nice to get some encouragement isn’t it?

Now, how many Gamerscore is hitting 100 One A Day posts worth?

Meme-tastic: Your Debut Album

I’m not normally one for this kind of bollocks, but this one tickled me somewhat. Not in the bollocks. It did, however, make me wonder just how many of today’s bands actually are taking the “random name” approach when it comes to 1. their own name and 2. their album titles. Particularly pretentious emo whiners.

Anyway. I came across this on PMOG, which I mentioned a couple of entries ago. There’s a whole thread on their forums about this which is quite entertaining if you’re into that kind of thing.

Here’s the deal: First go to this link, which generates a random Wikipedia article. The article name is your band name.

Next, go to this link, which generates some random quotes. The last four words of the last quote on the page is your album title. Repeat this step if you want to generate some track titles.

Finally, go to this link, which is Flickr’s “Explore the last 7 days” link. The third photo on the page is your album cover.

I came up with this.

My Debut Album
Featuring the smash hit "In the Wizarding World"!

Weirdness of the Web: PMOG

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.