PMOG

PMOG: Passively Multiplayer Online Game

One of the presentations I attended at the Games+Learning+Society conference last week was about blurring boundaries between the times when you're actively playing games online and the times when you're doing everything else. There were several different presentations discussing such examples where online gaming and normal daily tasks intersect, but the most interesting example was that of the PMOG.

Developed by Justin Hall a band of other weirdos, PMOG is a game that can be played by anybody who surfs the web. You create an account, add an extension to Firefox, and off you go. You get points for visiting websites. You can use the points to buy 'mines' which you can leave at various sites to blow away other peoples' points. You can also buy treasure, and leave it for others to find. You can create a 'quest' wherein you create a list of websites about something that is so cool you think everybody should learn about it, and then people follow the quests and receive more points at the end. You can also tag websites. I think there's a relationship between the tags people leave on sites and the points you get for visiting those sites, but since I'm still a relative newbie, it's a bit unclear. Justin noted other 'games' with similar intents, such as one in which you score points for taking less time to read your email.

Why am I obsessing about this right now? Well, for one thing, this presentation was given entirely in a language I could understand: English sans WoW-speak. But seriously, what makes games so compelling? These points will not do my dishes or pay off my student loans, yet I find myself venturing out beyond my normal circle of websites in the hopes of scoring more points. Why?!? And how can I harness this power that games exert and bend it to my will? I plan to use the pile of points I've racked up to make a quest that takes people through the library's Teen website in order to add an element of danger to the somewhat lame scavenger hunts we give in the name of resource orientation. There are an assortment of minor technical issues I'll have to figure out before I can do this, but ultimately, I'll be curious to see if the game adds incentive to actually exploring the links on the website.

Why are games compelling? Do we lack an element of danger or risk in our lives that we try to replace with gambling with virtual stakes, or by overlaying our normal real lives with virtual games? Maybe I just like games because Nintendo appeared during an impressionable stage in my life. However, the experience of playing Zelda for 8 hours straight (and getting in a LOT of trouble for doing so) does not equal that of idly surfing the web. It is also a little discomfiting that there need to be incentives added to everything in so that people might feel driven to something. But I've spent too much time writing this and it ain't earnin' me no points, so I must be off!