Passively Multiplayer Online Game

You've tracked them silently for days, learning their style, their routines, their favourite places. Now you've finally made your move: traps laid, you lurk inside Netflix.com to watch it all play out. Your first mine catches them off guard as they make their Tuesday evening sweep of Major Nelson's site. Your second tags them on the rebound, as, shaken, they head back to your profile to see what else you have in store. But you never find out about mine number three (lodged deep inside Amazon.co.uk, with that expensive toaster they've got a thing for) because with a misplaced sense of victory, you head towards Wired News, and that's when they get their revenge, with mines scattered on both the front page and the GameLife blog. Leaking data points all over Chris Kohler, you sign off, defeated. Welcome to the new internet: this time you're a player as well as a user.

If you've always thought of the internet as a battleground, PMOG - the Passively Multiplayer Online Game - will show you where the lines are drawn. If you've always seen it as more of an open-ended museum, then chances are PMOG will help you find the dustiest secrets. Who knows, even if you mainly log in for head-swaps and UFO footage, PMOG will probably have a thing or two to show you as well. At its best, when it's tangled you together with a rival, and the whole of the web has become your explosive playground, this can resemble the giddy one-upmanship of a good round of Spy Vs Spy. At its worst, it's just another window into same shrill hectoring you find on a thousand forum pages, as the old arguments grind on interminably, and you start to question whether this is really much of a game at all.

Badges are a lot like Achievements, without the social awkwardness of everyone seeing you played through that Avatar game.

Invented by blogging legend Justin Hall as part of a master's thesis, PMOG is a Firefox plug-in that turns the web into an MMORPG. You level up by visiting pages, using items to trap or reward other players, and completing user-generated ‘missions'. You can do as little or as much as you want: click on every mission, lay mines with bloody abandon, or just log in, surf, and let the process take care of itself. It's pointless, certainly, but then so is speed-running, and at least PMOG doesn't involve rote-learning Sonic the Hedgehog levels.

"We've been pleasantly surprised to see that passive gaming could be so popular," said Duncan Gough, PMOG's chief programmer, when we caught up with him last week. "I feel like we've learned a lot, and it's been exciting to be able to share our particular vision of games."

And nobody could say that vision isn't detailed. From the air-brushed steampunk artwork, to the clever reworking of videogame mechanics, PMOG has a very distinctive feel.

In short, if you like pop-ups, you're in for a real treat: once you've installed the game, almost every webpage you land on brings up a shower of notices about potential missions, the presence of in-game objects, and even updates on who has tripped or foiled your various traps.

PMOG wears its steam punk trappings with pride, even if the wood panelling does bring to mind the 1970s as well as the 1870s.

Deeper in, the central mechanics revolve around data points. Earned by surfing the web, these allow you to both level up and buy items. Your item use and actions eventually dictate which of PMOG's associations you belong to - an inversion of the class system of most games, where you traditionally select how to play upfront and then try to stick with it. Associations limit the kind of items you can buy at the shop - if you're not a Bedouin, for example, you won't be able to buy more armour, so you'll have to find it elsewhere. As with so much else about the game, the system initially seems topsy-turvy and slightly pointless, but it's been fine-tuned to encourage trade and interaction between players.

Some items are tailored for attack and defence, such as mines, which cause other players to lose data points, or St Nicks, which make mines explode in the planter's face. Then there are more creative tools, such as lightposts, which allow you to link websites together to form missions.

Missions are by far the most personal, and hence most controversial, aspect of PMOG. The idea is to string together themed chains of websites, a kind of guided tour of your personal interests for other players to discover. They range greatly in quality, from a plod through the wikipedia pages of every shoe a certain player's owned since 1990, to the whimsical brilliance of someone else's five-stop guide to the best origami sites. People aren't backwards about telling you what they think of your work, either. Missions have a review system baked in, and it's rare that you'll find anything rated higher than two stars.

A trawl through the comments section of the missions page suggests that the game's community has a slight tendency towards the sharp retort, which can presumably be rather painful when you've just stitched together a trail of your favourite things to show people. "It's still pretty friendly, but comments are always where people are the most out of character," says Gough, who admits that trying to keep PMOG pleasant is one of the team's main objectives. "We encourage a degree of rivalry and revenge within the game itself, but that's not allowed to spill over into outright rude behaviour. However, it's been easy to identify those people who have a positive effect on our community, and we give them the tools to keep things that way."

Beyond the slight in-fighting, PMOG has been met with a fair share of understandable suspicion due to the web-tracking at its core, with some alleging that the game is little more than self-inflicted spyware, and playing it not far removed from knowingly giving yourself tetanus. The game's privacy policy states that while PMOG tracks URLs, it does not track secure sites, or monitor what you type into web windows. The use of your data appears largely limited to sharing it with contractors working on the game itself. And while PMOG "may disclose player data in limited circumstances if we believe in good faith that doing so would: comply with legal process, prevent fraud or imminent harm, and/or help ensure the integrity of PMOG," this presumably has more to do with the war on terror than giving Jeff Bezos and the Russian mafia a direct insight into your shopping predilections and bank account numbers.

PMOG is a little buggy at times, with missions occasionally crashing, and the game's many pop-ups eager to lose themselves behind banner ads.

"We remember the early 'sponsored browsing' tools and we don't want to replicate that," adds Gough, who's clearly used to discussing privacy issues. "One of the earliest versions of PMOG was built for the BBC so we're acutely aware of the implications of web tracking. There's already a number of extensions that track where you go on the web, like StumbleUpon and the Google Toolbar, and neither of those companies have sold data for profit, so I think the standard is already set. We only store data that makes the game fun. On top of that we have a number of privacy settings for players, including the ability to delete all of your data."

Nor are PMOG's creators planning on funding the game by selling your data to third-parties - at least, not any time soon. "At this early stage we're looking at advertising, but now that we have the initial gameplay nailed down, I think it'll be exciting to look at other ways of making money from a passive game such as PMOG," says Gough. "Since we're a mix of web, games and social networking, we have a broad range of business models to consider."

That may sound ominous, but such fears aren't keeping people away. Gough describes the player base of PMOG as "moderately large," and also adds that a lot of people are sticking with the game over time.

The tutorial video boasts production values and implementation more suited to a Ukrainian airline's safety instructions than a cutting-edge web company's calling card.

Inevitably, passive gaming may be too strange and inconsequential for many, and might even be a little mean-spirited at times for others. But overall, PMOG's a testament to the way that game mechanics can subtly alter the way you approach everyday life, whether it's in-game items revealing a secret landscape within familiar web-pages, or user-generated missions bringing back the early days of exploration that categorised internet activity before the rise of Google. And although you rarely directly interact with other players, you'll still see their footsteps everywhere, in the missions they've left, the portals they've constructed, and the mines and loot they've laid in their wake.

Ultimately, then, PMOG is the internet, and while it may share many of its worst traits, it also shares some of its best, too. At the very least, the game provides a new perspective on things: familiarity may have tamed the web somewhat, but by giving its players an insight into one another's online lives, PMOG is already helping to bring back a little of its original strangeness.