Greetings Pmogeons! We’ve got some exciting new character art that I’d love to share with you. You should be seeing this on the website soon. The art was created by an artist named Colin Adams and it’s a more cartoon-like take on Steampunk. Here’s a preview of the Bedouin association:
Huzzah! We’ve been changing a lot about PMOG lately and releasing those changes to you, the players, rather than selfishly keeping them. This means that you can continue to give us feedback as you have been. Today I’m writing to tell you about some changes to the way levels and associations work that will be trickling into the daily play experience.
I have been trying for months to think of a better system than our current association calculation. On one hand, I didn’t want make yet another MMO that punishes multi-classing; on the other hand, I neglected the years of game design research that examines the emotional and psychological tie between the player and their preferred type. So we have a radical and yet imperfect current system in which the player’s assocation is decided by their tool use and recalculated every 72 hours.
As it turns out, this is a less-than-satisfying way to game. Not only do you get progressively fewer tools the more you level up, but then once you’re entrenched in the war between Chaos and Order it’s notoriously hard to stay who you are. (Feel free to mine me for that one.)
What the blazes am I rambling on about, you ask? Fear not. I totally have a point.
PMOG associations will now be calculated only by tool use and you’ll be able to level up separately in each association rather than having a meta-level that is nothing more than metaphorically significant. This means that you’ll be a Level 14 Pathmaker, a Level 10 Benefactor, a Level 9 Destroyer, and so forth.
But the best part of this change is that, in keeping with the experimentation we’re doing with the interface, we’re also prototyping new game features. Now you’ll be able to level up in each association separately and get access to new abilities as you do!
The first new tool that we’re releasing should only be available to Level 15 Benefactors. It’s called “Puzzle Crates.” If you deploy a crate as usual and have this option available to you, you’ll be able to “lock this crate” using Question-and-Answer fields. For example, you can lock 10 DP in a crate and ask people to answer: What are shoats made of? If the answer “bacon” is correctly answered, then the player who came across your crate will be able to loot it. If the player does not have the answer, they can “dismiss” the puzzle crate and will not have a chance to unlock it again.
So the new association/leveling system is not yet fully realized, but in the spirit of Beta and developing in conjuction with our community we’ve decided to release Puzzle Crates and show you your new levels as part of the version .5.12 release. In the future expect new tools to be released using a similar schema.
As always, thanks so much for playing PMOG: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game.
IndieCade, the independent games festival, has selected PMOG: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game as a finalist in the 2008 competition. Yay! We’re honored to be included in the festival.
As a result of PMOG’s inclusion, I’ll be speaking this weekend at E for All in Los Angeles, where Indiecade has a booth.
On Friday, October 3, I’ve agreed to speak to students from the Los Angeles Unified School District in the Education area. I’ve decided to talk mostly about getting seed funding to make online games, and why the internet p0wns the traditional game industry. I’ll be sure to post my slides after the talk and link to them here.
On Saturday in the IndieCade booth around 1pm I’ll be giving an artist’s talk about PMOG. Designing PMOG has been a challenge and a joy, so it’s something I love to talk about.
I hope to see some PMOG players there!
I’d love to know how you play the web with each other. The survey is only 10 questions, and the questions are about PMOG. Thanks!
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A group of players who call themselves the Tubenauts banded together to start a PMOG webcast about the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. Apart from the enjoyment to be had by listening to funny banter, the cast also serves as a crash course in the PMOG community. The panelists talk about the recent tool reset (which I didn’t handle very well, but which taught us a lot about our players), whether they play passively, and what their tactics are.
The cast is pretty professional: tonedef serves as the host, and ethdem, lehall, and snocrsh are all panelists. The cast is produced by zous and includes some really great musical interludes by pornophonic. It’s all very This American Life.
I love the section, What Nicks My Mines, in which one player rants against well, what upsets him. I think I am going to start using that phrase in my speech…
And to top it all off - the entire webcast is licensed by Creative Commons.
GameLayers is developing PMOG in concert with our players. As we build new features we’ll be testing them with small slice of the community, and we’re always listening to the feedback we’re getting. PMOG will only become more complex in its game dynamics and more flexible with its community.
So I will be taking notes during future Tubenaut webcasts, sipping on a bacon martini.
Many thanks to the players who made this webcast!
Much paper-based blood has no doubt been spilled over a question Richard Bartle posted on Terra Nova today. Why are MMOs largely composed within the fantasy genre? It can’t all be because of Tolkien, can it? And, by the way, Bartle offers this as proof that the most MMOs are, in fact, fantasies.
But I think that the root of the issue is the player’s physical understanding of the world. Fantasy relies on the metaphor of magic to be believable and science fiction relies on the process of technology to be believable. And it’s not even necessarily true that “magic” is some cure-all for the Oopsthatmakesnosense Syndrome. Magical universes need to be constructed using rules, and those rules need to be consistent.I think that the appeal of fantasy has an enormous amount to do with the metaphor of magic - and is not necessarily popular because *someone* doesn’t have a realistic physics engine. Sci-fi depends, unlike real technology, on the player having an understanding of why or how something new in the world works in order for its impact to be believable. And I say “new” because no one quibbles about the unlikelihood of Luke’s X-wing entering the atmosphere at a safe angle given its design, because an X-wing is basically a car and we understand that cars move. But in a sci-fi VW, if you were to send players to get xorphic acid for their ray gun, then you better have modeled in a top-loading vial on the ray gun for this acid to go into or have some other suitable excuse. This is especially true in books, tbh, but I think that the same scrutiny applies to VWs.
Magic, on the other hand, is largely what ppl use to explain technology to themselves. I think that ppl in general actually understand magic in a way that they don’t understand technology. Magic is about the end result, technology is about the process. And in a virtual world you often just want your players to accept the parameters you’ve laid down because, well, you need them to get past your fiction and get into the gameplay. Or get deeply into the fiction if there is no gameplay.So if your players are focused on the process of the world and not on its end result, then they are less likely to be immersed, and less likely to stick around. Players who stick around increase the profitability of the IP for which they came and stayed. I think that is when the exponential growth of fantasy worlds can be in part accounted for by the “some have been successful, more will be made” logic.
McSweeney’s recently posted this little gem of complaints “as explained by neglected girlfriend Janet Iverson” listing the Halo 3 cheats that would allow her boyfriend to spend more time with her and less time being what sounds like a complete slob and total bore.
Funnily enough, the piece is written by a man. That fact alone eliminates any responsibility I have to disprove its validity, but for the sake of completion I will grind its fragile bones to dust.
First of all, the “boyfriend” of this “woman” is clearly unworthy of having any girlfriend, let alone a specimen of the most powerful Girlfriend Guild: the Nerd Girlfriends. According to “Janet,” her boyfriend doesn’t shower or eat food other than doughnuts and Bugles and has no interests other than playing Halo 3.
Now that’s hot. With that diet and amount of physical activity he’s probably a stallion in bed. Janet, truly you are blessed.
Secondly, the author (in all his manly manliness) chose to craft this vignette on the stage of Halo 3. To that all I can say is: Maybe women who don’t like watching men play Halo 3, don’t like it because it’s a fucking shallow repeat of a game with the most despicable online community short of the guttercocks on Something Awful.
Let’s test out a couple scenarios: “Oh, what’s that? You’re going to dominate the living room screaming MOTHERFUCKING FAGGOT at the screen for the next six hours? I’ll see you later.”
“Oh, you’re going to play BioShock instead? Maybe some Assassin’s Creed? Mass Effect? Beautiful graphics, complex gameplay, interesting choices? And no fourteen year-old KKK members screaming homophobic and racial slurs over voice? That sounds awesome!”
Or even better: “You’d rather play Lego Star Wars or World of Warcraft with me than aim headshots from the same tower on the same map that you play over and over again because you suck too much at this game anyway? Kick ass! I call Darth.”
Honestly, 9 times out of 10, watching someone play a video game can be far more entertaining than watching a movie or a TV show. But not when that game sucks. Maybe if your girlfriend hates it when you play games, it’s because you play weak titles that rely on repetitive slogging through the muds of slaughter.
Or perhaps it’s because you’re a slobby, boring, jerk-off who doesn’t deserve to be graced by the presence of any true nerd, let alone a female nerd who wants to fuck you.
