The Nethernet Community News

We’ve had some fantastic chances to discuss PMOG amidst fast-typing web literate geeks. PMOG is right at home midst solar LED game experiments, genomic privacy discussions, and visions for trans-device social networks.

Now we’re heading further afield – Duncan and Justin will be presenting PMOG at the upcoming Futuresonic 2008 conference in Manchester, England: Friday May 2nd, from 12-1pm. This is the first time presenting PMOG at a conference where the Rza is the headliner! I’ve been a fan of his work since I watched him move from Liquid Swords to the sound track for Ghost Dog.

Here’s a brief writeup:

PMOG (Passive Multiplayer Online Game) is a trailblazer for a new generation of social media, making an ongoing social game out of our lives, online. Justin Hall asks what if you could bury treasure on your favorite web sites, or leave traps for your friends if they surfed the same sites after you? As we move towards openID, what are the privacy implications, and how can gaming mechasnisms give people more control over their data?

We are always honored to have the chance to present PMOG. We have plenty of ideas for the future of play, and the future of PMOG; running them through a different set of ears gives us a chance to reality-check ourselves outside the lovely rose-coloured San Francisco social technology bubble. Maybe they have a social technology bubble in North England as well? We shall see!

We are aware some invites received in the past 24 hours are not working and are telling players that their e-mail address and/or beta key is currently in use. Please rest assured, we are looking into getting you playing PMOG as soon as possible.

If you have e-mailed us, also rest assured, you will receive a response as soon as we have good news for you.

Update: 22 April 2008, 22:30 PST — Everyone should now be set to go.  If you received a bad invite link, please forward it to accounts at pmog dot com and we will get you set up.

We have been playing PMOG together now for months! We few, we happy few, we band of passive-ists. There are more people we need to play with. People who have been waiting in the beta queue. People who show up on twitter requesting invites.

We need more server capacity to allow in more players. So we’re working with our hosts Engine Yard this weekend to shift to some larger digs. More machines! More machine mind!

Sunday, if you come to the internet expecting play through PMOG, you may find things quieter than you remember. No mines may explode in your path, no Missions may beckon you, presenting another trail. The internet will have a respite from distributed play. For some part of a single Sunday! We’ll update here when this switch is finished.

EXPECT A PMOG OUTAGE SUNDAY 19 APRIL 2008 FOR A WHILE, STARTING AT SOME TIME, AND FINISHING AFTER THAT

Update:

We are back online!  Except when the server goes down.  We’re smoothing out those moments, steady as we go <tt>:-D</tt>

If you’ve been trying to passively play PMOG in the past few hours, you may have noticed that things are going a little slow, or there has been an unwarranted onslaught of 500 errors.

Long story short, don’t ever try to mix a lightpost, mine, and St. Nick together.

As of 21:00 PST, 9 April 2008, a production server has been taken down to address the likely source of the aforementioned problems. A developer is currently working hard to troubleshoot and bring that server back online. Until then, a number of services may be unavailable or unusable.

We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to have the server back up soon.

We should be back in full strength — proceed with caution.

21:00 PST, 10 April 2008