Addicted to PMOG
April 26, 2008 2:46 am Games for Fun, Gaming
I bet you’ll be hearing a lot more about PMOG (passively multiplayer online game) in the near future. I learned about it a few weeks ago and signed up for the beta. Well, I got an invite to start an account today, and I can say that I’m officially addicted.
The concept is simple: install a firefox “game” plug in, browse the web, and get points (datapoints in PMOG). Once you get enough points, you level up. As you visit various sites, you might stumble upon a “portal,” which is placed by other people playing the game. These portals might take you on missions which in turn, get you more points. Missions are just a string of sites that players connect together with “lightposts,” which are basically just comments on each site. So far I’ve learned how to set up an emulator for my DS, where to shop for girls, or the scoop on letterboxing, all while leveling up.
There are some other interactive elements such as dropping off crates with goodies for other players, dropping mines to take points away from other players, and deploying “St. Nicks” which prevent other users from planting mines on that page.
I see a ton of potential in this game’s future, and I would bet we’ll start to see copy-cat games coming out soon. Personally, I’d like a more sci-fi themed version of this game, with a little more strategy involved and a little more meaning in finding missions, leveling up, and character development. I’m thinking it’d be cool to have a ship instead of a character, which you can level up, get new weapons, maybe even do crazy shit like create “blackholes” which put graphic overlays on sites to make parts of them hard or impossible to read. Maybe it inverts all the colors on the page. What if there were resources on major sites you had to mine, or there was some element of resource gathering and empire building? Now that I think about it, you could take just about any turn based strategy game, maybe even some RTSs and board games, and apply those game rules to the PMOG concept. Anyway, in my ideal world, this meta-game would hit you in the face.
I know the game concept is supposed to be passive and I think the fun for me comes from the discovery of portals and missions. At first, I was hitting up major sites looking for missions, until I realized they’re all assessible from the PMOG site. That takes some of the discovery fun away from the game for me. Still, it’s nice to be browsing around normally and have a mission, portal, crate, or even a mine show up. PMOG has already changed the way I surf the web. Kudos to the people working on this game. I can’t wait to see how this game evolves.