I had some good times playing the game formerly known as PMOG and I will miss it, to be sure. What’s the Nethernet? It was an MMO that we played all over the web. The Internet was our game board and a toolbar on Firefox was how we interacted. The game developers are turning out the lights and moving on to other projects.

I started playing around the same time that I joined Twitter. Last night during a chat with a close friend from The Nethernet on IRC,  we realized that PMOG/TNN was the first time we took a chance and joined a social game. We let our walls down and made some real connections. I remember several months ago, the developers posted in the forum asking what parts of the game the players really enjoyed. I would guess, 99% of us said, “The community.”

Bean counters & marketing gurus are all about numbers. If you get the players/users, then you have a base number which you can use to estimate your all mighty profits from ads, subscriptions and the like. The formula is practically a law in the Internet business world. So, the developers of The Nethernet did what any start up company would do, they went out looking for numbers. Instead of numbers, they got us. We are a community.

We may not have a home, but I have hope to keep the connections that I have made. I humbly offer a refugee camp for those of you interested in remaining in contact. Snocrsh has also made a Ning for lost souls. You can also find many of us on freenode. You can connect through the web using their webchat or you can download xchat, pidgin, colloquy and a number of other free IRC clients. You’ll find your Nethernet friends in the channels #pmog, #thenethernet.com.

Share your own experiences, ideas for a new home or questions about IRC in the comments or the refugee camp. We’ll do our best to keep on jaunting.

So there’s been this damn college humor video on every site that I go to, the Matrix Runs on Windows.  It is a decent parody, but it is beyond viral in just 2 days, geesh.For all my Mac brethren, I ran into The Marble of Doom.   The idea is to log when your Mac freezes up with the spinning wheel of death and what application froze.  Of course, that will be a bit difficult to do when your OS if fucking frozen, no?

Anyway, check out the site if you’ve never been there, though currently the most offensive application is FireFox, so you may have trouble visiting the site.

So, if you haven’t tried PMOG, you should check it out.  I am playing right now as I type this, you dig?  It consists of a Firefox add-on, install it and earn Data Points for each website you surf.  Leave crates full of DP on a website for the next visitor or a nasty mine; drop a portal on a website that takes players to a similar site, or a site with the opposite opinion; light a lightpost on a series of websites and create a mission for fellow PMOGers to take.

That’s where PMOG Link Monday comes in, I have learned of some great tools, videos and websites through the game.  This is where I pass them on to you.

So, why do I play this strange game anyway?  That’s a good question, even one of the players, t-storm, asked that question in a very popular mission.  One of the ideas why we play, procrastination & the video example presented in the mission.

How to Fly without ID

After reading Doctorow’s Little Brother, I wanted to burn everything I own, move out into the woods, grow a beard and pray that aliens abduct me so I can get away from my freaky government.  The only other option, of course, is to stand up for what you believe.  How to Fly without ID is a great tale of how one man stood up for his constitutional rights.  Even if you believe that travel should be restricted in this post 9-11 world you should read his story, because you are only as secure as those in charge of your security.  Thanks to storyspoiler for the link.

Anonymity Experiment

If you like the last link, storyspoiler delivers another one in the mission.  Check out this article on trying to be anonymous in today’s world.

You know what I am doing right now? Check my twitter, you stalker. Twitter is a simple concept and I think that is what makes it appealing . It’s part social networking, part blog, part IM, and part…well…Twitter, I guess. With 140 characters or less, tell your friends what you are up to. I’ve been sick the last couple weeks and just managed to drag my ass to work, but sleep always beat out blogging, yet I did manage to write a blurb about what I was up to on Twitter. People have wrote loads of applications to use Twitter with Firefox, IM, blogs, etc. Check it out. Please. It would be a much cooler tool if I actually had friends.

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.