PMOG

I've never been able to get into mmorpgs, mostly for the multiplayer side of things. So I'm always intrigued when someone comes up with something that is a mmorpg, only not: Kingdom of Loathing, for example, which was massively single player and hillarious, and whose only flaw is deleting your account after thirty days. I got tired of restarting.

So I'm intriguied by PMOG--which bills itself as a Passively multiplayer online game. Clever. Points off on the terrible pun. But PMOG is interesting in that it's game "world" is actually the internet. You get points for going to new webpages. You use those points to lay traps for people, or, if you're nicer, to leave treasure chests for them to find. You can sabotage other people's trap laying, or leave "portals" that link to other sites. Using different tools affiliates you with different classes, and you can level up and earn badges.

It's obviously not a very in-depth game, and certainly not "immersive." It's not something you kill hours worth of time on. But, in the little while I've been playing it, it adds a certain amount of spice to my random internet binges. And I like the steampunk theme.

It does have a few flaws (of course, it's still in beta). The server keeps timing out, which can get very frustrating. The "missions" (actually collections of links you follow devoted to a particular topic) were an interesting idea, but feel kind of gimmicky--nothing really sets them apart from the other social link crawls that have been around for awhile. I wish they would have taken the name a little more seriously; some kind of puzzle or search element and a reward for completion might have made it more interesting. That said, some of the missions, when they were working, actually pointed to some interesting sites. The steampunk theme is cute, but there doesn't seem to be any effort to tie that in to a cohesive story or world. Some kind of back story would have been nice. Also, the help pages were not as helpful as they could have been.

All the same, I probably won't be deleting the firefox extension for a little while, at least.