KEY POINTS:
Now come online games you can play when the boss is watching - 2008 may just be the year of PMOGs (Passively Multiplayer Online Games).
In essence, this means you can play an easy MOG (multiplayer online game) passively while surfing the web all day if your boss or teacher doesn't notice your web time.
The idea is for the game to follow people as they surf the web, giving them experience points, levels, items and currency. PMOG layers social gaming on top of web browsing. Unlike the online strategy games, you don't need to continually return to your habit.
Small California/UK-based company Games Layer explains it this way: "This unconventional massively multiplayer online game merges your web life with an alternate, hidden reality. The mundane takes on a layer of fantastic achievement. Player behaviour generates characters and alliances, triggers interactions in the environment, and earns the player points to spend online beefing up their inventory. Suddenly, the internet is not a series of untouchable exhibits, but a hackable, rewarding environment."
Making play from personal data raises a number of interesting challenges:
* designing a massively-multiplayer online game fuelled by the limitless data of the human internets
* lowering the stakes for entertainment surveillance
* creating playful detail while obscuring data sources and specifics
* eliminating the grind from MMOs while encouraging player engagement.
It's first one is in private beta and comes as a plug-in extension for Firefox.
The extension follows you as you are on the web, sending game data to the pmog.com server. There, backend player profiles are updated, encouraging playful annotation of the wider web - for example planting mines on sites that other users might stumble into and sadly, the mines explode on them. They lose points unless they are wearing 'armour'.
The items, missions and traps are embedded in URLs and revealed to the player as they surf.
You can see a cut-scene from a game here or some Flickr photos from the development team and beta players here.
To sign up for a beta invite, visit the pmog.com site.
Developer Game Layers will be presenting the new concept at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in a couple of weeks.
