I discovered a new game to play that’s been occupying my time for a few days now.  I read about PMOG in TechCrunch earlier this month and immediately asked to be put in the beta.  I got the invitation to join last week.  It’s definitely still buggy, but it’s a lot of fun.

PMOG stands for “Passively Multiplayer Online Game,” and it’s played in the Firefox browser.  To play it, you have to download a little piece of software, which turns out to be a toolbar on the bottom of your browser.  Within PMOG, players themselves generate all the missions that players take.  Thus, your fellow players take you on a ride through their web.  A PMOG mission is a set of 5 or more webpages linked together with “lightposts.”    Recently I have gone on missions focusing on potatoes, maps mashups (go to http://www.walkscore.com to see how walkable your neighborhood is), dogs in Islam, and “geek news sites.”   I have made one mission so far, on crochet and yarn sites.

Besides the actual missions, there are various badges players can earn.  For example, there is a badge for players who visit Boing Boing every day for 7 days in a row, and one for players who visit 100 URLs in a 24-hour period.

At present there are about 3100 players, so it’s not a huge group of people.  The site includes a forum, and the ability to friend people (they can be acquaintances, allies, or rivals). The game also has the unique feature of being able to lay “mines” for players.  When you lay a mine on a webpage, the next PMOG player who goes to that website will set off the mine.  Players can wear armor; if they set off a mine while wearing armor, they won’t lose any points.  If they don’t have armor on, they will lose some points.  You accrue points by going on missions and creating missions.

The game is still quite buggy.  The message board for bugs is the biggest one in the PMOG forums.  Common problems include the fact that lightposts can’t be attached to secure websites (https), and if a page gets hung up on an ad that isn’t loading for some reason, then the PMOG lightpost may not show up properly, so the whole mission is stuck.  Sometimes I’ve just had to close out my Firebox browser and reopen it.

I am liking the game, although the bugs are quite frustrating.  On the positive side, however, it is a chance to see the web from other people’s unique, even eccentric, points of view.  A few missions have gone to standard websites, like Digg, but most are more unusual, leading participants to learn more about topics as disparate as superdelegates, wikileaks, and the Rubik’s cube.