3 posts tagged “pmog”
Alright, really, let's face it. There's nothing really life or death on my plate right now, and the only thing that's going to get the gears in my brain to spin up is to start writing about something that's been bouncing around in there for weeks. Since I don't have a "trusted system" in the GTD sense of the word, it's just been eating up processor time.
You might have noticed that I've been pretty vocal about how much I'd been digging PMOG in the last few weeks. You might have also noticed a sudden, sharp drop in my nattering. This is mostly because I felt like I hit a wall with PMOG where the signal to noise ratio tipped too far in the wrong direction. Or maybe not the signal to noise ratio. Maybe the possibility for interaction.
The geeks and early adopters that pick up on sites like PMOG have plenty of suggestions about what they want to see on PMOG, and they have a forum that's chock full of posts about. Maybe it's just me, but I have a serious aversion to bulletin boards as a way of producing meaningful discourse. I mean, talk about terrified sequential monologues, especially when no one wants to bother reading a thread that's gone out of control before they add their two cents. But I digress. The fact that you can't get any sort of notification if someone posts to a topic you've created, or a topic you've chosen to monitor is exemplar of the sort of basic interaction nuts and bolts that PMOG is currently missing.
PMOG is mainly a bank of "Missions" which are analogous to PowerPoint presentations that span multiple web pages. A nicer way of saying it is that they're like picture books. And like a good Richard Scarry book, the folks who read them should want to come back to the sites you've marked along the way to look for the informational equivalent of Gold Bug (a precursor to Waldo) on every page. The people who take your missions get points for every site they visit, and you get points for every person who completes a mission that you've constructed. Players can rate missions, and leave comments. If someone rates a mission you've made or leaves a comment about it, you also receive no notification, so you're left to go back through your missions to check for new comments. Tedious at best.
They also didn't really bother with any kind of comment threading on PMOG (something I still dislike about VOX, even if their "Reply To" option almost does the trick), so if someone asks a question or makes an interesting remark about something you've built, you can't respond to it except through a private message. It seems to me that discussing a thought-provoking or otherwise interesting mission would be the best way to get players to interact. They are, after all, the crux of game play.
I've also gotten frustrated by the fact that once a mission has been created, a few folks will take it and then it will basically fade into obscurity. Missions are always being made about a few of the same topics, webcomics being one of the most glaring examples. One of two things would be nice: I would like to be able to tweak and refine my missions and keep them in the public eye; I also think it would be an awesome game element if players could argue over and make adjustments to missions that didn't belong to them. That case always reminds me of memory palaces, and I love the thought of spinning off an entirely different system (an entirely different game?) that builds a glittering city of memory palaces which players fight over, mark up, knock down, and rebuild. I'd like to build that game, actually.
There's an entire subgenre of PMOG hackers who try to build missions with branching paths, but I've heard scuttlebutt that there's something in the works for that, so I won't go into it much here.
You can build a list of acquaintances, allies, and rivals and see what they're up to. Unfortunately, although it seems to show you if they've stashed a crate or foiled a mine (actions which are just about as meaningless as they sound), you don't see if they've built a new mission. At least I don't think you do.
While we're on the topic, though, there isn't really a lot of point to making someone an ally or a rival. More to the point, the main mode of conflict in the game focuses around devices that take away the number of points you have. Points are currency, points can buy you stuff to build missions, take away other people's points, or protect yourself or others from people who want to steal your points. Sure, sure, whuffie is the currency of the internet (although losing these points doesn't mean that someone else gains your reputation points or that you lose yours), but at this point, we're still just watching numbers go up and down.
There are "levels" which are (so far) meaningless. We've heard several times that there's some meaning coming at some point, and thus far, whenever the PMOG staff makes updates, they are usually pretty awesome (unlike certain other sites I could mention... *cough* *cough* VOX *cough*), but I really think that if you want to encourage even a playful sense of warfare between your users, you've got to come up with something better than making points go up and down. Nerds are a prankish lot, and I think there ought to be some sort of hypertextual equivalent of a "kick me" sign that would really get your gall up and make you plot some serious revenge. Literally being able to draw bunny ears onto a user's MySpace profile (visible only to other PMOGers, of course) or possibly turning them into a YTMND would probably be good options. The second one, though, relies on being able to get the word out that so-and-so has been YTMND'd in order to maximize the need for revenge.
Anyway, that stuff is a lot more like taking the game in an entirely different direction, but it does focus on my core point. I have a really hard time interacting with other PMOGers, which, I think, is the point of a game, right?
Blast. Someone else on MySpace asked me about my "music blog". Which is still snowed under the SXSW dump, my laziness, and a crisis of conscience about what makes for good music blogging. I mean, seriously, when was the last time I actually read about something I downloaded from We Heart Music? Of course, with that as my only ruler, I'm not going to get a lot of new ideas. I suppose I should check in with Stereogum or Hypemachine or something.
The only really fun "conversation" about music that I know of is the calliope but even that is sort of lost in the shuffle of new music from those two huge music grabs. Maybe I need to take the Dangermousian concept of the calliope a step further and make it like a musical version of The Connection. Carpet: Rug. Rug: Wool. Et cetera.
In other news, the beta version of Caption Booth on Tumblr is not going so well. I haven't added anything, and it's not been easy to get my two Beta Friends to contribute. After a short hiatus from KoL, I ended up back there. I find the twisted cosmology of the game to be immensely comforting. Meat Paste. Scrumptious Reagent. Pixels. Star Charts. There are all these clever (read: silly) ways of building items. I really want to take that kind of aesthetic and put it into some kind of community-building. I've got high hopes for Lila Dreams since all of the "smithing" is supposed to be done by gardening. That's clever.
Ikariam has me pretty hooked with it's slow-motion version of Civilization. I can check in a couple times a day, adjust resources, and watch my tiny empire grow. That's maybe what's got me thinking of places, instead of individuals. They just lanuched another server, and I had to resist the urge to set up a second empire there, just to see what it would be like to play somewhere that's still mostly empty.
Boots and I still muck around on NeoPets in spite of it's almost maddeningly late nineties aesthetic. There's always something nice about collecting stuff and playing with paper dolls. Every now and then I think about getting one of the goofy cell phone charms that would get me into Moshi Monsters. Seriously paired down stuff, but I'm really curious about how the same idea would work without the kruft that's holding NeoPets back in the 20th Century.
There's some larger post brewing about PMOG (which I've been noticeably absent from lately). It, more than anything else makes ideas fire out of my head like a Roman candle. Strangely, though, I felt like I hit a wall there, where I wasn't getting enough new and interesting interaction, only hitting snags. I just need to get my thoughts in order about it, though. The basic nut of it is a lack of interaction, based largely on my belief that BBSes are the worst way to keep people interacting.
Hm, music, music, music... This morning brought in Bad Veins which had a sound enough like The Killers, that it made me take notice. There's nothing really wrong with having a sound that's like someone else's sound. I think The Killers misplace the parts of their music that I like often enough that having a few back up bands, ready to pick up the fumble is probably a good thing.
Mannequin Men were the group that asked me about my "music blog." Naturally, I liked them, but I don't really have much to add about their music. It's good, solid rock and roll, that would probably make CCR proud. The trouble being that the CCR set is another thirty years older than my aging self, and more than happy to keep listening to CCR rather than letting music be organic and evolving. Me, I think it's important that someone is still out there, kicking out the jams. If I a). lived in Chicago and b). left my cave, I'd think that a Mannequin Men show and a couple of beers would be a pretty awesome evening.
The steady influx of RJD2 has piqued my interest in Shanghai Restoration Project which supposedly takes a lot of Chinese instruments and gives them a similar (at least to my ears) spin. The clips I've listened to so far don't quite seem to deliver as well as the background music to this commercial but I'll keep looking.
I need to look into a "three CDs I would buy if I weren't dirt poor at the moment" widget for this blog. Or for something else. Once again, I've ended up so diffuse that I'm not really satisfied with any of my online identities as the my Axis Mundi.
Goddamn it, you're clever people. Say something.
First, as a thank you for the Sterogum tip-off: there's also 3GB of music from SXSW for those who might have missed the post on Lifehacker. In other news a PMOG mission led me to the best food pr0n site ever. In the sense of food that gives you voyeuristic glee, not naked chicks covered in flour.
Seriously, let me send you a PMOG invite. So. Much. Fun.
