The Wrinkles Bit

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!)

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