Passively Online Multiplayer - life as a game!

Yesterday as I surfed around for info on Bill Burroughs and I came upon a blog page about Justin Hall's visit to Lawrence, Kansas in 1996. If you're not familiar with Justin Hall he is one of bloggings most prominent personalities. Justin began blogging back in the earliest days of the World Wide Web, and his blot, links.net, was a hugely popular, highly intimate record of Justin's living adventures. I read his blog frequently, and had actually read his piece about Burrough's many years ago.

I had stopped reading links.net a few years back, round about when he moved to Japan, even though Justin continued blogging from there (of course!). After reading over his Burroughs' piece again, I decided to catch up, and clicked on the homepage link. Surprisingly, it didn't look like links.net whatsoever. It turned out Justin stopped regular blogging a couple years ago.

Justin is the dude on the left

So, what's he up to these days? Well, he'd always had a big interest in gaming. In fact, he'd worked for a year or two at Gamers.com and later he contributed to Game Girl Advance. Now, it seems, he has been developing a game himself (well, him and some of his cool, geeky pals). And not surprisingly, given Justin's hyper-interest in the web, the game he's invented has everything to do with the web. And again, given his populist soul, everyone can be a player.

The web and video games are merging. All of information space is a shared multiplayer adventure. I am working to make that merging happen faster by developing "Passively Multiplayer Online Games" where your history of web browsing defines your online character.

The game is called Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG) and it's basic gameplay consists of its players web browsing. It's really just as simple as that, with a few tricks and treats thrown in for good measure. All that is required to play is a sense of adventure, and a simple little Firefox add-on. I signed up right away. After all, I've got a fairly heavy web surfing habit so this game is right down my alley.

You can read a whole lot more about Passively Multiplayer here at the game site. Read some of the larger theory documents about the game to really get a sense of where its creators are coming from. Of course, PMOG has its own Wiki.