Today Pathmakers will retro-actively get 100 more classpoints per mission they’ve published. And in the future when a Pathmaker publishes a mission, they’ll be earning 150 classpoints.
In the future, each player who takes one of your missions will earn you 10 Pathmaker classpoints.
Seers once possessed knowledge of an ancient device. It was a key: flat and dense and made from the same metal that ground Portals. Years ago a prototype of the device was uncovered by a young explorer at the edge of digital space, underneath a holding page. The site itself later became xkcd, funnily enough. But the young explorer who made this great discovery was said to eventually become Satisfied. He left the jaunting life for middle management and a good health plan. So, the Seers forgot him. It’s what they do.
Partly due to this forgetfulness the design of the device was lost for many years. Only recently the documentation, such as it was, was rediscovered by Professor Esper. He saw that whoever wrote it was toying then with the essence of links - the connective tissue that binds the sites on The Nethernet together. He made a couple of prototypes and realized he could unlock the Benefactor’s Puzzle Crates. He knew he had to keep it safe from the forces of Chaos. The professor turned to the Bedouin to protect it. The Bedouin had been crafting a new form of energy under his guidance and he more faith than ever in them.
Unfortunately for Professor Esper, his assistant Whil had the unhappy chance to run into Victoria Ash on the edge of a flame war… while he was meant to be transporting a prototype of the device between labs. Victoria recognized Whil as Esper’s man. She drugged him with a small prick of poison and he crumpled to the ground. As she searched his person she heard him mumble something about puzzles and keys. In a compartment in his boots, Victoria found a flat, dense, key with the top half of a skull on one end. A key to a puzzle, perhaps?
Just then she got a PMail from one of her spies: ‘Busy Bedouin bees, no? I hear their factories have started up again’. The well-guarded Bedouin were no less guarded with their plans and she had heard nothing about Bedouin progress. The last she saw they were training with heavy armor to be able to dodge and disarm their enemies. And now these sounds… maybe fancy footwork was not all they had in mind.
Later that night Victoria took a portal into the stock yard of a Bedouin factory. Until recently these factories had been abandoned and some Seers had come through looking for lulz. By the time Victoria got there, the busy Bedouins had already packed puzzle crates full of their something and stacked it them in rows. Quantities of this amount were clearly for trading, or sale.
Victoria carefully approached the stacks of puzzle crates. No doubt some of them were trapped. She glanced at the question inscribed the metal locks. Something inscrutable to her, as usual. How annoying. She went through her multitudinous hidden pockets and pulled out a key she’d taken from Whil. As the key turned in the lock, Victoria remembered a story Esper had told her about an ancient device of the Seers, the Skeleton Key. Likely they would pay a high price for this.
But something new had her eye now. The crates had thousands of coils of blue energy within them. She picked one up and tapped it. The coil glowed a little more intensely. One of her pet St. Nicks crawled out of her red curls and buzzed around the light she held. Victoria turned the coil upside down - two prongs were sunken into the base. Her St. Nick alighted on one and its metallic wings moved faster and more viciously. The St. Nick flew off, wobbly at first and then with purpose, toward a broken piece of armor left on the ground from ages ago. The Nick landed on the shard of armor. The armor shattered.
Victoria smiled. She summoned some of her allies and they quickly hauled the crates back through the portals.
It was time for her to negotiate with the Seers. They’ll want their Skeleton Key back.
Epilouge, Ninefinder
Ninefinder was rarely allowed alone in Professor Esper’s office but his analytical processes told him that was exactly what was needed now. He had been there quite a lot lately while the Professor worked on his new Skeleton keys and Ninefinder believed that they might hold the answer to a problem that had recently developed. Of late the sites illuminated by lightposts on missions had been under heavy attack by Destroyers. The Destroyers were using the lightposts as guides to the most traveled routes and, something need to be done to slow them down. Ninefinder had taken one of the keys apart while Professor Esper had been distracted but the professor had noticed and take the key away before the analysis was completed.
That afternoon when Professor Esper stepped out for his afternoon tea Ninefinder went in the office and extracted a key from the console the professor had placed it in. Ninefinder throughly examined the key and the socket in the console, his processor almost on the verge of over heating. Analysis completed he returned the key and left, already reverse engineering the key and locking mechanism. Once Ninefinder finished the design and distributed it (Open source, of course!) lightposts would be able to be protected by puzzles the same way Benefactors protected their crates from prying Organic fingers.
Epilouge, Jerdu Gains
The girl took at least 20 crates of the Vengeance coils, he realized as he looked over his lieutenant’s report. If Victoria’s engineers figure out how to harness the energy to make deadlier St. Nicks, or gods know what else, the results could advantage Chaos for months… perhaps longer.
Jerdu sighed and began a PMail. “Tuesday - my old foe. I have a proposal.”
We’ve recently launched a new currency for PMOG: Pings. Pings are a social currency that you earn by interacting with other players. Anytime that you play with someone, you should earn Pings.
Over the next releases of the game, you’ll start to be able to spend your Pings. Pings upgrade tools to give them special functionality. Benefactors will spend Pings to upgrade their Crates to a Puzzle Crate.
For now we’re letting you collect them so that you start off with a goodly sum.
This is how to earn Pings:
After seeing the totally rad jokes about the strange new tips in the bottom of the web browser from uselessness, we thought we’d try to get your help in making some more of these. 
Is there anything that you wish you’d have known as a wee Shoat? Are there any jokes that we should be telling players?
Download our starter pack and have at it! Post your contributions on this forum thread.
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.
