Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG)

[Tale]

http://pmog.com

Anyone into this? It's a Firefox plugin that turns normal web browsing into a massively multiplayer game. You level up by browsing the web, leave traps for others on websites they will visit, complete quests across the web, etc.

One of the people behind it is Justin Hall, well-known to me as a pioneer of various other Internet developments like blogging.

It looks a bit primitive so far, but I think it's worth knowing about as MMO stuff evolves. Metaplace is one direction, this seems like another.

[tmp]

You level up by browsing the web, leave traps for others on websites they will visit, complete quests across the web, etc.

Does the newbie starter quest require you to kill ten rats find ten porn images? if so, this has potential 

[Endie]

If it's the one I think it is, I think goonfleet jumped into this, dominated it for a few days then almost immediately lost interest and went back to massive shitposting in COAD vOv.  That should by no means be taken as a criticism of its finer qualities.

[Mantees]

http://pmog.com/about/privacy

Automatically Gathered Information:

    * We store a list of other players that you interact with, these being your acquaintances, allies and rivals. We also store a copy of any message you send and receive using the PMOG messaging system. We store a record of your actions in the game: tools used, datapoints earned, missions taken, comments left, ratings made, forum posts and missions made.
    * Through our PMOG web browser extension, we look at each URL you surf and we check that specific URL for the presence of an in-game tool.
    * Then we store those URLs in a database to render out your badges.

[Trippy]

[Xanthippe]

Sounds more like being gamed than playing a game.

[Tale]

With your consent, you're only giving them what you do while playing. You switch it on and off.

Also, the guy behind this ("search this site" accesses a decade of daily content) is ex-Wired digerati, leftfield online royalty. He travelled across the USA in the 1990s, teaching poor kids the internet. He registered domain names early for fun and never sold them - try http://bud.com - He hangs out with people like Howard Rheingold and the boingboing crowd. The happy snap on his homepage just happens to be taken by Joi Ito.

He's doing a social experiment with gaming, not collecting information for nefarious purposes. Of course, that doesn't stop someone stealing it and misusing it, but if that happened he would probably die of shame.

[Trippy]

Just because he might be a living saint doesn't mean the other people working on it or who have access to the data are. And what happens if you forget to turn it off? Can you go in and delete your own URL entries? Can you create a "whitelist" so it only tracks the domains you allow it to?

[Tale]

*necro*

A scattergun braindump post-mortem on what went wrong with this PMOG startup: http://www.raphkoster.com/2010/03/11/gdc10-justin-hall-fate-of-a-social-games-company/