PMOG

Passively Multiplayer Online Game. That was a brown bag topic here at Mozilla, which I have rather forgotten a good portion of it. But the goal sticks; reward people for surfing the web.

The most attractive aspect of the game is that it is passive, which is rather unique. It doesn’t command, nor require your complete attention. So what’s the point?

In my day-to-day work schedule I rather view on a selected few sites. I may rarely visit more than a dozen sites. mozilla.org would be one, mozilla.com, xulplanet.com,… bugzilla, but that falls under mozilla.org… google.com,….google.ca,…. that’s about it. Far less than the dozen I estimated.

On my spare time, I visit my personal sites. I won’t outline them here, of course. I may visit a few more sites.

PMOG rewards people for exploration and exploitation. You earn points by visiting different websites, and exploit them by setting up ‘mines’ so other people lose points. You complete quests, which gives you even more points. (Is it just me, or is it starting to sound less like a passively multiplayer game?)

Once you have accumulated all these points, into the thousands, and tens of thousands, and heaven forbid the hundreds of thousands. You can have a beer, and say you waste your time surfing the internet.

PMOG is a firefox extension that tracks where you go on the web. As creepy as that initially sounds, they claim only to take the url and date/time and discarding the url afterwards. Although I wouldn’t earn many points. I don’t explore the web as much as some people do.

I took it out for a test run under a new profile, and did the drugs quest and the ‘tools of the web’-type quest. Although fun, its also very slow to load. I think the images are even pulled from the web.

One thing that is preventing me from using it, and others too, is the very nature that its tracking everywhere you go. Whether it discards the url afterwards is irrelevant (to me anyways). Although now its for targeted to people ‘like us’, I’m less than thrilled about something sending information to some foobot about where I go. Are my fears even justified? Have I no faith in these people? Everywhere I go, information can get tracked and logged.