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!

If only maintenance could be achieved through passive activites.

Alas, it cannot.

For some, Sunday mornings may be easy. For others, pie is the only thing that is easy. For us Trustees, though, we will be hard at work for a couple of hours this Sunday morning (9am - 11pm GMT, 1am - 3am PST).

You may experience some interruptions to your normal Pmogian existence, and for that we are apologetic. You should stay in bed, though, you really should.

We update PMOG every few weeks (check our version history, no lie!). So it’s not normally a newsworthy item. But this latest version, version .415 is exciting.

Too many folks were having login issues. Working with Mark Daggett we looked at some awesome extensions like Twitterfox to see how they handled multiple users. Now the PMOG toolbar shows you your last successful login, it makes switching easier, and you can clear out previous records so PMOG logins don’t get confused. All of this means fewer folks should ever notice logging in to the PMOG toolbar!

We integrated a bunch more help. Now, right-clicking on a tool give you a “Learn about…” link. There’s a Help menu with a Reset command, handy for switching skins after changing your preferences. There’s a Report a Bug window, so anyone having trouble can help us tease out their PMOG’s confusion. And, you can browse deep into the Codex, discovering the difference between a bedouin and a benefactor, a portal and a lightpost, and a ready link to the Appendices for even more strategy.

And, there’s more icons in our toolbar, courtesy of the skilled cursors at Turbo Milk in Latvia.

As of today, we’re listed publicly on the Mozilla site for extensions: Firefox Add-ons: PMOG - out of the sandbox! Alex Polvi sighted a final bug - players who are veterans of the February and March 2008 PMOG wars who have been away from the toolbar for a while would find a preference error. Fixed now in .416!

Polvi has been working on favicoop:

(give it a second to load)

favicoop - an extension which collects the tiny little web icons from each site you visit and contributes them to a shared mosaic. A Mosaic of the web! It’s about time.

Greetings Passive-ists!

We at GameLayers wanted to give you an update as to what is happening behind the scenes of PMOG right now.

To start with, we greatly appreciate everyone sticking with us through our growing pains. We are working daily on optimizing our code for faster page loading times, throwing up fewer 500 error pages, and providing greater overall stability and performance.

We are working to resolve a number of gameplay issues: bugs with mission making, editing and taking, and a few issues with badges. For an updated list of top known issues please see the Top Known Issues Forum Post.

Additionally, thousands of badges will be being issued over the next few days. Another batch of badges has been added for your earning pleasure including rewards for visiting Digg, Reddit, Massively, and keeping up on World of Warcraft.

You might have also noticed a recent increase in your level, too. We have readjusted levels to reward you for your hard work and for the leveling experience to be more of a gradual curve rather than a steep climb to the top.

To keep up to date with news from the development team check: http://pmog.com/forums/pmog-news

If you’re having any issues, check to see if you have the latest version of the extension. We release an update every few weeks which tends to solve more bugs than it creates. Soon we’ll be serving up PMOG from addons.mozilla.org.

A big thanks to those of you who have submitted bug reports and have helped to get a number of issues quickly resolved. If you ever need assistance, find a bug, or want to provide us with your valuable feedback, please use the contact information listed on our Contact page.

A game is nothing without its players; a heartfelt thanks from everyone at GameLayers to you.

Yours,
Joe Wagner
Player Support Liaison
@burdenday

Great news, there’s more maintenance on the way!

On Sunday 25th May PMOG will be down for some routine maintenance between 9am and 12pm GMT.

On a Sunday, mind, you should either be asleep in bed or asleep in church, so missing out on all those datapoints won’t hurt all that much

Hello,

We’re going to run some general maintenance tomorrow at 10am GMT for 1 hour.

During this time, PMOG will be offline.

Never fear, you’ll be earning valuable datapoints shortly after!

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!

• TechCrunch: <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/12/pmog-launches-go-lay-some-mines-on-your-friends-myspace-page/
  ">PMOG Launches - Go Lay Some Mines On Your Friend’s MySpace Page, by Michael Arrington
• BoingBoing: Passively Multiplayer Online Game launches — using game-scoring to keep track of and expand how you browse, by Cory Doctorow
• GigaOm: PMOG Launches — With An Om Award! by Wagner James Au
• LifeHacker: Blow Your Friends Up as You Surf with PMOG by Gina Trapani
• Laughing Squid: PMOG, A Browser-Based Passively Multiplayer Online Game, by Scott Beale
• Smart Mobs: GameLayers launches PMOG, by Stephanie Gerson
• Next Generation: GameLayers Readies First Web Browsing MMO, by Tom Ivan

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

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. 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!

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.