A muthafo’ing P-M-O-G
Passively multiplayer online games, or PMOGs, were a hot topic at March’s South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas. And the guy leading the panel discussions was Justin Hall, who explains the concept behind the social networking sites best:
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!
Let’s use the PMOG bud.com, Hall’s site, as an example (check out other PMOGs here). You create a profile and fill out a survey about your Internet habits. The program then tracks where you surf. This may seem like a goldmine for marketers, but Hall doesn’t have plans to sell the information ? his intentions are purely academic.
You can also talk on discussion boards and participate in “quests,” which are just little games that teach you about a topic. For instance, someone in my video games seminar created a “pants quest,” so he provided links to Web sites where you could buy pants. Silly, but amusing.
Depending on your habits, the site categorizes you as a player: you can be a seer, a destroyer, a pathmaker, a hoarder. I’m guessing this plays into the player types defined by Richard Bartle (and later expanded on by Nick Yee) a little while back: achiever, explorer, socializer and killer.
With regular ol’ MUDs, I’m a killer ? clearly. As for PMOGs, I’m a hoarder, with a little bit of seer. A hoarder is apparently someone “concerned with amassing embedded objects along the network roads, but not building the roads themselves.” I’m guessing these “objects” are information? The description goes on to say hoarders frequently check out social networking, video and music-sharing sites. And a seer “reads art zines and sports scores, shop online, and use social networking sites.” Not far from the truth.
The best part about these user profiles is you can access graphs that chart the types of sites they’re checking out and how often. This, of course, means joining these networks makes it that much harder for you to hide your porn addiction.
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PMOG very interesting
keep ‘em coming, Brink!
[...] talked a bit about PMOGs (which, you may recall, I talked about last week), and he raised an interesting point: That PMOGs are really just “awareness” tools ? [...]