twopointouch

The other very good - but slightly scary - thing about last night was bumping into Duncan Gough. Duncan and I go way back. I was his English teacher at college. Now, it seems, he’s a proper grown-up with a wife and child and everything. How old does that make me?

He’s not just a grown-up, however. He’s also a pretty accomplished developer working for Cominded and he was telling me about a private project he’s working on called PMOG - passively multiplayer online gaming. The idea struck me as incredibly zeitgeisty.

This is the deal. You install a Firefox extension that records everything you visit on the web. It uses this to create a roleplaying game character. If you visit blogs a lot, then you might become a Seer. If you use a lot of aggregators, then you’re a Hoarder, etc. You get experience points and build up levels and skills depending on which sites you visit. So basically, you end up with a profile of yourself as a web citizen done in a tongue-in-cheek, Dungeons and Dragons-ey way.

Earning ‘datapoints’, the game’s currency, allows you to buy items - which might include a way to suggest that fellow players visit another site. I went to digg with the extension installed, and there was a suggestion that I visit dotherightthing (interesting site, btw). It’s possible to create quests - a trail of clues to sites you need to visit in order to complete the quest and earn more experience and datapoints. These will probably have a learning objective in the most part, but this is also the main opportunity at the moment to monetise the project. There’s the possibility of sponsored quests whereby - and I’m making this example up - visiting boots.com might earn you a special elixir of healing.

So what does this bring together? The fact that so many people are attracted to the likes of Twitter - telling people what you’re up to on a microscopic level a lot of the time. People are also talking about putting up online Lifestreams - pulling together your feeds from Twitter, flickr, Upcoming, del.icio.us, your blog and whatever else you do online to create what amounts to a moment-by-moment account of your life. I’ve got something like that on my tumbleblog. Duncan feels that there’s a movement towards ’self-surveillance’ - we’re creating and giving up all this information about ourselves that historically would be very private. Why? At a guess, it’s about alienation in the modern, post-industrialised world, a dysfunctional public culture that places personal achievement above community, a sense in geek culture that our lives are online anyway and that this process is giving that some physicality, plus the sense of our identities otherwise being dissolved into the morass of people doing pretty much exactly the same thing as us.

A variant on this is the talk about attention metadata - the record of what you’ve done and where you’ve been online. If Duncan was evil, he could sell all this data to advertisers. They’ll know exactly what you do and when you do it - the possibility for almost perfect targeting. The other alternative is to give it to the users - they’re already doing this through a widget you can put on your site/profile to show off your in-game avatar. Those users might even be enabled to sell their own data to advertisers. Depending on how accurately PMOG’s profiles for players can be mapped onto existing market segmentation models, this might be very attractive indeed. At the moment, though, PMOG throws away the URLs you visit once they’ve recorded the impact it has on your persona.

Absolutely fascinating. I’m still level 0 on PMOG, though - I’m using Opera as my main browser nowadays. (Oh -and that’s the thing I forgot to say about widgets - apparently, there are currently 25 main platforms for widgets. And they’re all completely different. Eep!)