Passively Multiplayer Online Game

Wha?

Here’s the premise, a game that you play by simply carrying on with your normal Internet routine. How is it a game? Well, when you are logged in you receive 2 datapoints for every site you visit. When you reach a certain amount of DP you level up. DP is also used to purchase some game “stuff.” Perhaps you would like to purchase some armor, because another player may have left a mine at Google when they visited. If you go to Google the mine will go off and you will lose some datapoints. ‘Passively’ is the optimal word because I am not sure that it is completely passive. After all, I was desperate to level up so I was visiting sites and trying to find crates of goodies left by other players.

One can also make missions for other players. Send some people on a tour of your favorite sites, useful reference materials or whatever. When people take the missions, they obviously earn DP and may find some valuable information. Like, I have never been to the world’s smallest site before. It is a fun way to share bookmarks with other users.

Another facet of the game is the associations. If you go around dropping mines, you end up becoming a destroyer. If you go around dropping crates full of goodies on sites, you become a benefactor. There are a few other associations, that is just an example of two of them.

The game uses Firefox only at this point. Why you’d use some other browser is beyond me, but it makes use of Firefox’s ability to run scripts on top of sites. There are loads of great plug-ins, add-ons and greasemonkey scripts to use with Firefox to make Gmail more useful, get rid of that annoying about.com bar when you click on a link there, etc. Search away and find some goodness.

The game is still in beta, and does have quite a few quirks. There are several missions that I have started and not finished because the game went down. Of course when the game is down you don’t earn points either. That part can be frustrating, but the community more than makes up for it. At this point in development, everyone’s opinion counts. Someone posted in the forum that it would be cool if there was a ‘favorite’ mission list or something like that and days later it was a reality.

Since it is in beta, I am unclear about how one joins. The front page has a box to enter your email to join beta, however, another user invited me. As a PMOG player, apparently I get two invites a week. Thus, those of you interested, drop me an email, christopher@sikkdays.com, and I will do my best to get you an invite.

For more info on PMOG, try this blog and review. More in depth and probably shorter than my blog posting about PMOG. Go figure. Or try the site, PMOG.

For other games that I have talked about, click the ‘games’ tag below and check them out.