It’s a crude generalisation but people used to split into those that played video games and those that didn’t. As the boundaries of what constitutes a game expand and the genres morph to include party games such as karaoke game singstar, brain boosting exercises like Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, interactive mysteries and Alternate Reality Games and the physicality of games on the Nintendo Wii - with the recent opportunity to have your own digital personal trainer with Wii Fit it’s not surprising that the types of people who play games is changing too.

I’ve recently come across an even newer trend in gaming which might turn even the most reticent game players in to ‘gamers’ by becoming unwitting participants in the Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG).

In ‘traditional’ Massively Multiplayer Online Games (or MMOGs) players spend hours of their lives solving virtual problems and developing virtual relationships. These are an additional pleasure (or burden depending how you see it) on top of real, everyday life. The Passively Multiplayer Online Game claims to become seamlessly part of what we’re already doing. The makers claim that PMOG is “a trailblazer for a new generation of social media, making an ongoing social game out of our lives, online” and that “The mundane takes on a layer of fantastic achievement.” http://passivelymultiplayer.com/
To turn your own mundane web-browsing into fantastic achievement, you’ll need Mozilla/Firefox installed and the PMOG extension http://pmog.com/help/install/ which will add the PMOG toolbar to your browser. Once it is installed the plugin creates an infinite and always on game that is weaved through everything you do online. Your web surfing is converted into experience points and virtual currency. You can actively seek out missions, or choose to be entirely passive and wait for them to come to you. You can bomb other players, wage war over web sites, and lead other users on web missions.

Although I’m intrigued, enough that I’ve just installed the extension myself (I’ll let you know how I get on) I can’t help thinking that this is something that might just help me to waste even more time.

I’d be really interested to hear from anyone who has tried out the PMOG beta themselves.
See Guardian’s game blog for one such account: www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/20/internet.games

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Flux, innovation, General ramblings, media, games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.