PMOG News

PMOG offers people to chance to make and take Missions about the web. A sequence of web sites that tells a story! Routing other players through your online trails.

There have been a huge number of Missions created in the last few weeks! It’s been a fantastic outpouring of perspective. Here is Mike Schramm talking about Missions from a recent review of PMOG on Massively.com:

Missions are quite interesting, and this is where PMOG’s real potential still lies. To create a mission, any player can put down “lightposts” (which are like bookmarks) on a series of URLs, and then link them together to make missions. As you wander around the Internet, then, you’ll hit some of these URLs, and each one you hit will invite you to “take” a mission.

In the early days of PMOG, there weren’t too many of these floating around. But as more people have started playing, there are more and more missions out there to take, and they’re getting more and more varied. Unfortuantely, lots of them are still just like browsing people’s bookmark folders — the large majority of missions you find are some player showing off “Sites I Visit Daily” or “My Favorite Gaming Blogs.” But there’s innovation to be had here — I took one mission that showed off “Obscure Web comics,” and was really impressed by the variety shown off.

We want to be sure that players can find cool Missions. And we want to be sure that players are not too distracted by lame Missions, or Missions that are broken.

So GameLayers is pleased to announced three new Mission features:

A New Mission Generator

Now, making a Mission is a four step process. Identify the Mission, Organize the Mission, Test the Mission, Publish the Mission.

You can save a draft of a Mission in progress, as you pull together their links and sources. You can drag links around, making your trail. And then when you’ve got something good, you can test it, using our new Mission testing framework.

Mission Testing? Easy! Just complete the Mission from the Mission Generator page. If you can complete the Mission, there’s a much better than ce that someone else can follow your web footsteps and complete your Mission as well. After you’ve successfully tested your Mission, you can publish it on PMOG.

Lightpost Editing

Lightposts make up the backbone of Missions. Lightposts can be put down at any time, as you’re traveling online - simply click on the Lightpost icon in your toolbar. Then you should get a PMOG window where you can describe that site for later. Then, when you go to make a Mission, you’ll see all the Lightposts you’ve collected, waiting for you to string them together with a sense of purpose.

Now we have a page where you can organize, delete and edit your Lightposts; linked from their player profiles.

Mission Quality Threshold

So anyone that makes a Mission puts a Lightpost down in the path of future PMOG players. As they wander the web, they’ll see an invitation to play! To take a Mission that crosses through a site they happened to hit. Small invitations to adventure! Strewn across the web.

How do you ensure that you’re seeing cool invitations? Invitations to Missions you want to undertake? Top-shelf stuff only please! Or maybe, you’ll take a chance on anything.

We’ve built a preference setup that lets players decide how much Mission experimentation they want to do:

This feature is described in more detail in a reply to a player question on Get Satisfaction: “Can I turn off mission lightposts?”

We hope these Mission improvements will help anyone make, scatter, and take up small calls to adventure across the web. We have many more features in store! Thank you to our patient beta testers without you would wouldn’t be having nearly as much fun online.