1. INTRODUCTION

We use our computers every day for deeply personal and confidential work. If you could watch us, who we communicate with, what we say, when we say it, you would know so much about us. All that personal effort we put into our computers represents a security threat, and a great opportunity.

How can we make greater use of that time and energy we spend online? Passively Multiplayer Online Games is a proposal to create play around our data. Playing with our data will help us learn to understand and manipulate our trails, and give us a greater sense of how we spend our time.

And what if we could cooperate and compete during this time we spend on the computer? Not just arranging ideas over email, but sharing tasks and racing to complete something. It would be like we were playing a multiplayer video game!

2. "PMOG"

PMOG stands for "Passively Multiplayer Online Game." It's an alteration of Massively Multiplayer Online Game ("MMOG"): rich, graphical, group problem solving software that appeals to tens of millions of folks around the world.

The "Passively" part here refers to our data trails: a history of our actions on the computer. Our data detritus! In a Passively Multiplayer Online Game, your mere presence on the network registers moves in an ongoing group adventure.

2.1 MMOG

World of Warcraft ("WoW") is the world's leading MMOG, with millions of subscribers. The game provides a rewarding structure for organized fun, in a richly detailed cartoon fantasy world. The WoW head-up display facilitates participation in fantastical productivity:

But there are two primary obstacles to widespread popularity for 3D MMOG games, even games as polished as WoW. One, players are required to run demanding client software. It uses a lot of screen space, system resources and network bandwidth. MMOGs don't suit multitasking. Two, these games are like a parallel life where you are learning to get ahead with other folks. When you are done, the time you've invested stays in that game: you can't take any record or evidence of your character with you to another game or other applications.

2.2 Elsewhere Online

Maintaining our identities in virtual worlds takes substantial time and energy. People who have weblogs know this well - any regular reader will ask, why haven't you updated recently? Current self-portraits get stale fast. There's so much information being updated from all sides, it's easy to feel behind in a race to present and re-present oneself continually in the ongoing electric carnival in the sky.

So what if we spent our regularly-scheduled time on the computer, and this crafted our online character?

3. Light Touch Weblogging

3.1 SpyWare vs. MyWare

There is software that follows us already. Evil-doers might secretly install "SpyWare" on our computers. This SpyWare can watch us type and visit web sites while copying our passwords and credit card numbers. Youch! Bad surveillance.

But there's another kind of personal computer surveillance software: MyWare (Wilson, 2006). This is software people install to watch themselves. What websites do you visit most often? PageAddict will tell you. What music have you been listening to in the last month? Try Last.fm. What program do you use most on your computer? Try Onlife for Mac OSX - it takes a screen capture picture every 30 seconds, of whatever window is foremost on your computer. Onlife's designer, Edison Thomaz, is quite consciously making a modern incarnation of Vannevar Bush's Memex (Thomaz, 2006).

In 1945, Bush envisioned a rich personal database, a memory extender with associative trails between the information added to and existing in other libraries (Bush, 1945). The Memex still hasn't taken shape, though our computers offer a tantalizing ability to merge all our study into a ready reference. For many young folks, the most compendious view of their personal life is available through their MySpace page. MySpace is a place to hang out and experiment with identity online, and as we participate, we compile extensive archives of our social connections and pastimes (boyd, 2006).

But it takes time to update a MySpace profile! With photos, blog posts, friendly comments. Today, thanks to flexible web software designers, you can populate your MySpace page with automatically updating "widgets" that show your ten most recent songs from last.fm, recent photographs of you posted on Flickr, the five most recent Wireless Internet hotspots you've used shown on a Plazes map of the world. With the early advent of personal computers, it seemed like we might be able to assemble our own extensive archives; increasingly it seems we are going to have the archives assemble around us, with or even without our direct participation.

4. Experience Points

Software is keeping track of us. We have our data reflected back at us - we have been listening to songs on the computer for years, now we have a paper trail. Why bother? Because we could be getting experience points.

Experience points were popularized by pencil and paper role playing games. They serve as a unit of measure for quantifiable experience. If you're designing a game where players can fight a dragon with a sword, you can declare that players will get 500 experience points for accomplishing that. In our daily lives, you can't say exactly how many points you'll get for helping a relative through a hospital visit, or taking your first international airplane flight, but we know you've lived a bit more after that, you have more "experience."

The game of life is beyond the scope of this paper; we propose to take the simple game mechanic of recording and rewarding actions, to give people experience points for what can be recorded and quantified on the computer.

4.1 Merging Video Games and the Web

Passively Multiplayer Online Games is an early attempt to figure out how to merge the feedback, personalization and encouragement of video games with common computer and communications tasks. The target audience is independent creative professionals who are somewhat compulsive about their time on the computer: people who work to optimize themselves, people who happily linger in cyberspace, people who create things and circulate ideas online.

5. Prototyping

5.1 PMOG for Newbies

Passively Multiplayer Online Games was first explored during a talk at South by Southwest, in Austin Texas, in March 2006 (Hall, SXSW, 2006). At that time, the idea revolved around mapping locations of people surfing so you could have a sense of co-adventuring through web space with other web surfers. By June 2006, "Passively Multiplayer" had taken shape as a computer system that followed you and gave you experience point levels for your chosen activities online (Hall, Aula, 2006).

Alice Taylor is Vice President of Digital Content at the BBC Worldwide, and editor of a video game culture weblog where she had been postulating on merging MMO-type gameplay into social software (Taylor, 2006). She suggested that a PMOG could be a useful tool for educating fledgling web surfers, internet "newbies." Even veteran users tend to fall into a web comfort zone - the same news sites, same 'blogs, the same few online marketplaces. If you know where someone is surfing, you know where they are not surfing, and you could step in and say, "hey, you haven't seen this whole exciting part of the web yet."

This would be a simple link-recommendation engine, unless you have a strong editorial voice. Taylor agreed to Executive Produce a PMOG prototype for the BBC to promote web literacy. Weblog? Tags? Folksonomy? RSS? Creative Commons? Internet Archive? To a small group of frequent internet users, these are daily terms. And they drive much of the innovation that is becoming commonplace online. Can we use a PMOG to bootstrap broader web literacy for casual surfers?

From the start the project was scoped as a proof of concept. A first draft PMOG wouldn't catalog all the sites on the web, nor would it be the definitive guide to web literacy. But it would give a loose sense of the experience being externally directed and motivated in otherwise casual web surfing.

A few internet experts: Howard Rheingold, Douglas Rushkoff, Cory Doctorow and Mark Bernstein, contributed to a list of sites that are key to contemporary web literacy. In addition, I combed the Alexa list of top 100 and top 500 sites for the US, the UK and the world overall (Alexa is a privately owned company that uses an optional browser plug-in to track web statistics). From this, I developed a list of approximately 130 different sites that make up the bulk of people's web surfing experience. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Sony. Major newspapers, music sites, movie sites, weblogs, schools. Gossip, sex, shopping sites. Enough to begin to give people points in specific areas, and perhaps describe them: you're mostly a research surfer, with a bit of shopping and gossip. I am a games, research, news and social surfer. Broad strokes, based on our stops at major web crossroads.

There are a number of taxonomies for web sites: the dmoz Open Directory Project, the Webby Awards, and the Neilson NetRatings each offer an overview of categories for web sites. After reviewing those three, I hewed most closely to DMOZ, developing a set of twenty-one categories to describe web sites. This kind of URL-labeling is inherently broken: the New York Times might be a news site, but an article about fashion from the Times would be better categorized as "fashion" (or shopping? or home?). Still it served to begin to roughly describe the characteristics of URLs.

5.1.1 Tracking the User In Browser: Frame

Now that we had a first-pass framework for categorization, we needed a way to track users across the web. Duncan Gough is a UK-based programmer and game designer who has been writing for years about "Massively Casual Online Games" ("MCOs") (Gough, 2005) - systems to draw together the millions of tiny games taking shape on the web, to give them a common framework and experience for disparate users. A meta-game for tiny games, a mix of casual games and social software.

In August 2006, Gough came on board to build the first multi-user tracking prototypes for PMOG. Gough had positive experience with Ruby on Rails, a programming language adapted for rapid-building of social web sites. Using Rails, we were tracking ourselves through a web browser by late September. We used an in-browser frame that sat above the regularly scheduled content, to cater to the newbie audience who might need some web coaching:

The frame could be launched in any web browser, but many web sites broke the frame (mostly by reloading themselves at the last second). Unfortunately, chief among these frame-breakers was Wikipedia, a significant stop on any "web literacy" tour. This issue remains unresolved for the prototype; our desire was to build a first draft accessible to inexperienced web users, not create a foolproof system for total web tracking.

At Taylor's suggestion, we instituted a minimal user registration system: asking only someone's email address. We were proposing to track people's movements across the web, so we didn't want to expect them to give their name, age, postal code, and other personal details typically requested at many web site signups.

Also, to keep clear of the stringent protections for users within United Kingdom's Data Protection Act, we decided we would not keep a database of where people had surfed. We check the URL when they surfed, determined the relevant keywords and points, and then forget the URL. There was no way to compromise our databases and emerge with an incriminating evidence trail of someone's recent web peccadilloes (the August 2006 accidental publishing of AOL user searches drove our sense of purpose with regards to privacy in this area).

Players could login and have their personalized frame above other web pages working within less than a minute. We built in contextual prompts: when a player first begins playing, there is ample help text. As the range and number of sites they have surfed grows, the help text recedes, to be replaced by a more advanced web control panel.

As people surfed, their player profiles took shape. The genres they had surfed, their overall web literacy level, the countries they visited, the browsers they used.

With so much contextual information in play, Taylor brought aboard an interface designer: Phil Gyford. Gyford has been working in user experience and interface design for over ten years; including his work republishing the Diary of Samual Pepys as an encyclopedic online hypertext (Gyford, 2003).

We were accurately displaying a range of surfing statistics for players, but there wasn't a sense of play or even motivation. How could you drive someone to explore the web? And how could they contribute from their own knowledge into the game system?

5.1.2 Quests: A Glimpse of User Generated Content

Duncan Gough developed a Quests system - a simple sequence of URLs that could be shaped around a topic, and reward the user with a record of completion. The linearity and regimentation of our quests system actually resembles Bush's design for flipping themed groups of sequential pages with his Memex. It was fragile, like the in-browser frame: any clicks outside of the navigation bar during a quest would sideline the user. But the Quests presented a flexible architecture for sharing progress on the web. Short sequences of web sites can provide commentary on each other, and give a sense of a topic. Plus, it was fairly simple to allow any user to create a quest. This created exciting and volatile potential for user generated content. For a game of the scope of PMOG, no author or design team could keep up with the potential audience; users will eventually need to create content for one another.

One alternative might be randomly stringing together web bits into machine-generated quests; programmatically expanding nonlinearity to promote replayability (Aarseth, 2003). But one important aspect of this system is the sense of human presence in the network: while randomly strung together series of web sites might appeal surrealistically, a sense of purpose and progress typical of games would only come from some sense of deliberate design.

It will be a challenge to incorporate user-generated content in to a newbie-friendly, web literacy-promoting environment. Borrowing a page from Howard Rheingold's lessons on Virtual Community (Rheingold, 1993), we've established pre-requisites: players needed to complete a number of quests and demonstrate web literacy through surfing before they advance to become quest creators. While largely untested, the hope is that we could establish a system of training and "graduation" for someone who plays the game enough to understand how it might be appropriately extended. To keep new players from becoming confused, we ensured that only pre-approved quests appear for the early stages of play.

5.1.3 Reality Fiction

Theoretically, play can be constructed in a vacuum. However, theme and story go a long way to inform game dynamics. We experimented with a number of fictions for this first draft of PMOG. First we tried a sea-faring explorer theme, with funny hats and seven seas metaphors, using avatars drawn from Alice Taylor's StorTroopers service (Taylor, 2000):

But it hued dangerously close to the cute mateys of YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates, and there was nothing intrinsically "web" oriented about it. An artificial fiction, underdeveloped for a prototype, seemed worse than a lack of fiction altogether.

We played with a careers theme: how might your web surfing tendencies suggest a career. This seemed more fitting, since careers match more directly the experiences people are having online; becoming domain experts as they follow their curiosities through search engines. But after diagramming out job charts based on web site categories, "careers" seemed absurd when taken to its logical extreme.

We framed this prototype as a literal journey across the web, playing up the quests and user statistics, and playing down any overall sense of judgment or game arc. The lack of explicit story or narrative leaves the game feeling a bit clinical: we used lively visual design to create the look and interface feel of a video game, even as someone wasn't engaged in some sort of explicit power fantasy. We probably still need to include avatars in some capacity.

5.2 PMOG 4 Veterans: Firefox Extension FTW

Creating this new-user friendly version of a passively multiplayer online game whetted our appetites for a more immersive version of this experience. We were beginning to play the PMOG, and we could see how we wanted to expand it.

The limits of the user frame grew clear with time. Wikipedia, New York Times, and Etsy (a marketplace for DIY craft makers) - each of these three major sites broke our frame. Tabbed browsing (opening links in different sections of the same window, popular in 21st century web browsers) also broke the extension. Ultimately, we stood to be some of the first people to start earning experience points for all the hours we spent in our web browsers. How could we stand to wait, to start having all our web surfing tracked and rewarded in-game?

5.2.1 PMOG Firefox Extension

In December 2006 Gough drafted a PMOG Firefox extension: it tracked surfing wherever a user traveled online.

This tight integration with the browser offered several immediate advantages: every URL was being scored. The player could surf with the extension open or closed, freeing up space in the primary window: certainly for advanced surfers, this was a big factor - we wanted to be un-obtrusive.

We wanted PMOG to be constant: if the game is always tracking you, unobtrusively, then we could architect passive play experiences that would unfold over time. PMOG could be a game that demanded participation only as you had time.

Otherwise, you were still moving forward, still earning experience points, items, standing in the community just by going about your daily online routine.

This was a framework that began to solve a key problem for World of Warcraft: advancing in that game requires many hours over many days over many months. If you're already spending that kind of time on the computer communicating, researching, how could you get a tangible artifact of achievement from that?

The Firefox extension is our current draft; the gameplay is developing around the statistics we scrape from surfers.

5.2.2 Real Fiction

The Firefox extension offers a greater potential for play: we have a more stable window which can live alongside browsing, for ready appearances of game items, actions, player profiles and buddy lists.

However, architecting gameplay around literal web surfing became a strain. What are the monsters a player would encounter web surfing? What tools would they have in a game world? What items would they collect? Collecting .gifs, links and text could be potentially fulfilling, but seemed too abstract and technical when we could have something more explicitly playful.

Writer Merci Hammon had been involved in brainstorming PMOG from the first moments; in January 2007 she composed a fictional world treatment shaped around passive web browsing. Hammon envisions a struggle between people who upkeep the ordered web, and the people who favor more chaotic elements. Borrowing from Richard Bartle (Bartle, 1996) and Dungeons & Dragons (Gygax, 1973), she created a number of character classes that suit online activities, each with their own tool for altering the web surfing experience of an aware player.

Even with fiction to lubricate the ludological design, we struggled to ensure that the game could be played without playing. The most important action was to sign up, to choose to play. After that, a player was simply a part of the game, by being born into it. Progress Quest, designed by Eric Fredricksen (Fredrickse, 2002), offered some of this passive-style play: a user sets the game in motion and the game plays itself. PMOG takes this "perpetual motion game" and adds indirect user input through their own online behavior. If a player never checked the PMOG Firefox extension again, they would continue to generate moves, items, actions within the game environment. And yet, if someone wanted to actively optimize their PMOG experience and create experiences for other players, they would have ample tools and conscious collaborators at their disposal.

5.2.3 Microformat

In December 2006, Duncan Gough drafted a PMOG Microformat: a few lines of markup text that could be embedded in any web page, generating an item within the PMOG database when a user surfs across that site.

This promises a rich range of content for PMOG, as authors on the web could theoretically contribute game items into the economy.

How can we structure progress and play within a points, tools and currency system, to allow for new objects to enter from any point on the network? Open-ended online games like Second Life and Game Neverending have confronted these questions already. Second Life decentralizes the fun, making any game dynamics the responsibility of individual player/creators. Game Neverending folded into Flickr, a popular photosharing that helped spawn Web 2.0. Web 2.0 has been a movement in software to break online data up into chunks allowing it to be reconfigured according to social relations and human suggestion. PMOG would love to join the Semantic Web movement that is following on the heels of these developments: turning any part of the living internet into pieces of a game, and allowing anyone to extend the game in their own direction.

6. Future Directions

Today we have a working web browser-based game, a functioning Firefox Extension and a draft microformat specification. We are working with an expanding team of contributors to shape a lively fun PMOG experience. By April 2007 we will have a version open to players online. PMOG as a platform offers rich potential for exploration; here are some scenarios and concerns:

6.1 PMOG Expansion

6.1.1 Collaboration

There are a few other projects developing in this area: Attention Trust is a plugin for Firefox that outputs an XML file of a user's browser history. A user can distribute this XML feed wherever they see fit; there's a few sites experimenting with these user trails. Seriosity has developed a plugin for Microsoft's Outlook, the leading corporate email software, keeping track of email habits and rewarding people with points and badges for productive and social behaviors. Microsoft's Xbox Live service, incorporated into their Xbox 360 console, watches people playing single-player games and uploads their game scores and results to an online profile. Jaiku is mobile software that senses other phones nearby and publishes location and activities extrapolated from these patterns; there is clearly deep gaming potential in mobile presence applications (Hall, Helio, 2006). As online, networked MyWare spreads, there will be more experiments of these sorts: opportunities to join multiple self-reflections in software into unified personal profiles.

6.1.2 Web Scouts

Participating on the web involves much more than surfing, clicking through links. Pure surfing was the easiest thing to track at first, also privacy concerns kept us out of people's email messages and things they typed into web pages.

Venture capitalist and online activist Joichi Ito suggested PMOG could serve as a way to track people's contributions to a wide range of web sites. Do you tag photos on Flickr? Contribute useful edits to Wikipedia? Start good threads on forums? Machine parsing a useful contribution from simple baiting is a huge challenge. As data exchange increases between web sites, PMOG profiles could show someone's Flickr level, their Wikipedia contributions, their Ebay reputation, their MySpace customization level, and so forth. Good deed doer on the web? You are an exemplary web scout! This sounds like a system for judging online conduct - a web-wide reputation system. That is beyond the current scope of PMOG, but as the web is increasingly woven together, systems of web-wide play could enable people to practice and develop good online participation practices.

6.1.3 Developing a Literacy for Personal Data Control

A computer constantly watching you could be a terrible thing. Identity theft is only the beginning; a meth addict fishing credit card offers out of your trash has limited access to your life. Someone who wanted to mess with you could really play havoc if they had access to your chat scrolls, your email and your bank accounts - everything you touch through your personal computer.

However, we are already leaving trails online and offline. A number of companies have begun to offer users the chance to sell their personal media habits in exchange for deals and discounts. Most large supermarket chains give small discounts to customers willing to have their ongoing purchase histories indexed with loyalty cards. We are facing a world in which our privacy and personal history of consumption can be brokered.

Games like PMOG teach people to expect to control, manage and profit from their personal data trails. Profit in terms of compensation for yielding preferences to marketers, and profit in terms of self-reflection and connections to like-minds in knowledge communities online.

6.1.4 Audience

Creating a multiplayer online game that watches surfing and lives in the Firefox web browser definitely caters to a subset of a subset of a subset of computer users. Which is fine - this is an early adapter population, and our interest is in testing new frameworks for human-computer-human interaction. However, the BBC prototype illustrates a useful framework: build an appealing game for early-stage internet users, and teach them to play "the internet game" at a higher level. Then, as they advance, players are coached on changing their browser and installing the plugin; this is the sort of user training and difficulty adjustment video games have refined more than nearly any other sort of software (Larson, 2007).

If the architecture and experience are appealing, other contributors can expand the game to run in other browsers, sites and platforms as well. Ultimately, we are all in this internet together; adding a layer of play allows us to experiment and practice the behaviors of collaborative learning and collective understanding, turning the web into an infinite game (Carse, 1987).

7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A hearty thanks to the people who contributed to and advised the development of PMOG. These are some of the folks: Merci Hammon, Alice Taylor, Duncan Gough, Phil Gyford, Ben Cerveny, Scott Fisher, Tracy Fullerton, Patricia Pizer, Julian Bleecker, Eric Zimmerman.