Passively Multiplay

PMOG Newsflash
May 12th, 2008

PMOG Launch Go!

We pressed the big red “launch” button that’s been staring us in the face. Hurrah!

PMOG is open for play by anybodies now. Come one, come all, let’s game together online!

We wrote up a press release: “GameLayers Launches PMOG, the Tools of the Playful Web” and we created a 70 second video PMOG experience as well:

We were fortunate to get a number of inbound links from top shelf weblogs. That much excitement in a short amount of time briefly staggered our servers. With help from our hosts at Engine Yard, we were able to allocate appropriate brainspace so PMOG can continue to think and play the web with yew!

If you’ve ever had trouble logging in to PMOG, hopefully you can access the site now and play PMOG whenever you feel like it -D

PMOG Newsflash
April 28th, 2008

PMOG @ Futuresonic

We’ve had some fantastic chances to discuss PMOG amidst fast-typing web literate geeks. PMOG is right at home midst solar LED game experiments, genomic privacy discussions, and visions for trans-device social networks.

Now we’re heading further afield - Duncan and Justin will be presenting PMOG at the upcoming Futuresonic 2008 conference in Manchester, England: Friday May 2nd, from 12-1pm; here’s a brief writeup:

PMOG (Passive Multiplayer Online Game) is a trailblazer for a new generation of social media, making an ongoing social game out of our lives, online. Justin Hall asks what if you could bury treasure on your favorite web sites, or leave traps for your friends if they surfed the same sites after you? As we move towards openID, what are the privacy implications, and how can gaming mechasnisms give people more control over their data?

We are always honored to have the chance to present PMOG. Futuresonic Logo We have plenty of ideas for the future of play, and the future of PMOG; running them through a different set of ears gives us a chance to reality-check ourselves outside the lovely rose-coloured San Francisco social technology bubble. Maybe they have a social technology bubble in North England as well? We shall see!


April 22nd, 2008

Playing with the Children of Flickr

Tomorrow in San Francisco, at the Moscone Center, the Children of Flickr will be gathering - for a panel - “Children of Flickr: Making the Massively Multiplayer Social Web.”

10:50am - 11:40am Wednesday, 04/23/2008
Design and User Experience 2003

Flickr was one of the first popular Web 2.0 web sites: a social photo sharing web site that helped popularize tagging. Flickr was born of an attempt to make a browser-based Massively Multiplayer Online Game about information exchange: “Game Neverending.”

Today, the children of Flickr are continuing to work massively multiplayer game mechanics into social web sites. This panel will discuss strategies, models, and pitfalls for harnessing the power of play to promote the social Web.

Who are the children of Flickr? In this case, three people:

Rajat PahariaChris ChapmanGabe Zicherman

Rajat Paharia from Bunchball, Chris Chapman from Steel Anvil Studios / Areae, Gabe Zicherman from rmbr

For some preview of what we might be discussing, check out Amy Jo Kim’s recent PARC lecture Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software. She examines the playful social dynamics of Youtube, Twitter and Facebook. Tomorrow we’re going to be discussing strategies for intertwingling play into online life.

PMOG Newsflash
April 20th, 2008

OMFG! Let me in!

We are aware some invites received in the past 24 hours are not working and are telling players that their e-mail address and/or beta key is currently in use. Please rest assured, we are looking into getting you playing PMOG as soon as possible.

If you have e-mailed us, also rest assured, you will receive a response as soon as we have good news for you.

PMOG Newsflash
April 19th, 2008

Capacity is Coming

We have been playing PMOG together now for months! We few, we happy few, we band of passive-ists. There are more people we need to play with. People who have been waiting in the beta queue. People who show up on twitter requesting invites.

We need more server capacity to allow in more players. So we’re working with our hosts Engine Yard this weekend to shift to some larger digs. More machines! More machine mind!

Sunday, if you come to the internet expecting play through PMOG, you may find things quieter than you remember. No mines may explode in your path, no Missions may beckon you, presenting another trail. The internet will have a respite from distributed play. For some part of a single Sunday! We’ll update here when this switch is finished.

EXPECT A PMOG OUTAGE SUNDAY 19 APRIL 2008 FOR A WHILE, STARTING AT SOME TIME, AND FINISHING AFTER THAT

PMOG Newsflash
April 9th, 2008

Unscheduled Interruption

If you’ve been trying to passively play PMOG in the past few hours, you may have noticed that things are going a little slow, or there has been an unwarranted onslaught of 500 errors.

Long story short, don’t ever try to mix a lightpost, mine, and St. Nick together.

As of 21:00 PST, 9 April 2008, a production server has been taken down to address the likely source of the aforementioned problems. A developer is currently working hard to troubleshoot and bring that server back online. Until then, a number of services may be unavailable or unusable.

We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to have the server back up soon.

Ram Cat Strikes Again!

PMOG Newsflash
March 27th, 2008

Missions Update: 3 Points of Light

PMOG offers people to chance to make and take Missions about the web. A sequence of web sites that tells a story! Routing other players through your online trails.

There have been a huge number of Missions created in the last few weeks! It’s been a fantastic outpouring of perspective. Here is Mike Schramm talking about Missions from a recent review of PMOG on Massively.com:

a picture of the top of a review of PMOG on Massively.com

Missions are quite interesting, and this is where PMOG’s real potential still lies. To create a mission, any player can put down “lightposts” (which are like bookmarks) on a series of URLs, and then link them together to make missions. As you wander around the Internet, then, you’ll hit some of these URLs, and each one you hit will invite you to “take” a mission.

In the early days of PMOG, there weren’t too many of these floating around. But as more people have started playing, there are more and more missions out there to take, and they’re getting more and more varied. Unfortuantely, lots of them are still just like browsing people’s bookmark folders — the large majority of missions you find are some player showing off “Sites I Visit Daily” or “My Favorite Gaming Blogs.” But there’s innovation to be had here — I took one mission that showed off “Obscure Web comics,” and was really impressed by the variety shown off.

We want to be sure that players can find cool Missions. And we want to be sure that players are not too distracted by lame Missions, or Missions that are broken.

So GameLayers is pleased to announced three new Mission features:

A New Mission Generator

Now, making a Mission is a four step process. Identify the Mission, Organize the Mission, Test the Mission, Publish the Mission.

four steps to make a PMOG Mission

You can save a draft of a Mission in progress, as you pull together their links and sources. You can drag links around, making your trail. And then when you’ve got something good, you can test it, using our new Mission testing framework.

Mission Testing? Easy! Just complete the Mission from the Mission Generator page. If you can complete the Mission, there’s a much better than ce that someone else can follow your web footsteps and complete your Mission as well. After you’ve successfully tested your Mission, you can publish it on PMOG.

Lightpost Editing

Edit LightpostsLightposts make up the backbone of Missions. Lightposts can be put down at any time, as you’re traveling online - simply click on the lightpost icon Lightpost icon in your toolbar. Then you should get a PMOG window where you can describe that site for later. Then, when you go to make a Mission, you’ll see all the Lightposts you’ve collected, waiting for you to string them together with a sense of purpose.

Now we have a page where you can organize, delete and edit your Lightposts; linked from their player profiles.

Mission Quality Threshold

So anyone that makes a Mission puts a Lightpost down in the path of future PMOG players. As they wander the web, they’ll see an invitation to play! To take a Mission that crosses through a site they happened to hit. Small invitations to adventure! Strewn across the web.

How do you ensure that you’re seeing cool invitations? Invitations to Missions you want to undertake? Top-shelf stuff only please! Or maybe, you’ll take a chance on anything.

We’ve built a preference setup that lets players decide how much Mission experimentation they want to do:

set your PMOG quality threshold preference

This feature is described in more detail in a reply to a player question on Get Satisfaction: “Can I turn off mission lightposts?”

We hope these Mission improvements will help anyone make, scatter, and take up small calls to adventure across the web. We have many more features in store! Thank you to our patient beta testers -D without you would wouldn’t be having nearly as much fun online.


March 11th, 2008

Ruby on Rails: Using UUIDs and Having Functional Tests

Duncan has written previously about UUIDs and our use of them in PMOG. We did run into a issue with tests while using UUIDs and so I wrote a plugin to help mitigate the problems.

The Problem

During development the database is built using the migrations, which correctly build the table ID’s as UUIDs if you’ve implemented them as we have. However, when you run tests, the test database is built using the schema.rb file that is generated by the ActiveRecord core. It assumes auto-incrementing integers as the ID column and ignores your special UUIDs.

The Solution

Head over to the plugin I created with help from Mark Daggett on the Google Code site: http://code.google.com/p/uuid-schema-dumper/ and install it in your rails app as a plugin.

./script/plugin install http://uuid-schema-dumper.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

Then, run the db dumper rake task: (You only have to do this once)

rake db:schema:dump

You’ll notice in your schema.rb file that the column ID’s now match your migration UUIDs. Thus, your tests will run without a hitch (so far as UUIDs are concerned)

Leave comments if you have any problems :)

PMOG Newsflash
March 11th, 2008

Finished a Run

PMOG just finished a crazy run of conferences - Game Developers Conference, Emerging Technologies Conference, and South by Southwest Interactive. It was a blast being able to share ideas with folks on the road! Thanks to those conference organizers for including us.

Now we’re hoping to be able to embiggen PMOG some, to welcome new players and see how the game feels when more of our friends are playing with us. Some days you might be able to register for PMOG directly, some days you might have to wait in a beta queue. Within a few months, everyone should be playing together online.

We’ll post coverage and maybe slides and videos or sound recordings from each event if we can find them. Otherwise, we’re watching PMOG on Tweetscan to see what people are saying or playing.

Real-time Twitter Search - Tweet Scan

PMOG Newsflash
January 31st, 2008

Midnight Maintenance

PMOG will be down for maintenance on Thursday, 31 January, midnight California time. We should be back up some time after that! Just a few hours, we think, from where we sit, before the maintenance starts.