GameLayers

GameLayers, Inc. is a venture-funded game company looking for a full-time interaction designer with a focus on user experience to help us make a massively multiplayer game out of daily web surfing. GameLayers, Inc. produces the Passively Multiplayer Online Game: PMOG. PMOG has been featured in Wired, Technology Review, Edge magazine, The Guardian Online, TechCrunch, and numerous other online and print publications.

GameLayers is looking for developers to help us build PMOG, an MMO game in Firefox.

Portfolio Magazine, the business publication from Conde Nast, has published Lauren Barack’s piece exploring the business potential of PMOG.

Christian Donlan declares:

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.

From the Eurogamer Hands On Coverage of PMOG.

Mary Jane Irwin has written an article entitled “Gaming the System” on Forbes.com which includes PMOG as an example of motivating people through video games.

PMOG launched Monday 12 May, and received a great range of coverage:

San Francisco - 12 May, 2008 - GameLayers announces that PMOG, the game about being online, opens today for anyone to play. The first web browsing MMO, PMOG brings online social play into Firefox-based web browsers.

So many of us spend hours each day on the web. What do we have to show for our time? PMOG gives players points for surfing with the PMOG Firefox extension. Those points can be used to leave traps or treasure on any web site, for other players to find. Suddenly, surfing the web is a casual multiplayer online game.

The School Library Journal covers PMOG in their May article, “Masters of the Universe,” featuring a school media specialist’s take on PMOG as an educational opportunity. They included a cartoon explanation of the game!

GameLayers is profiled in the May/June 2008 MIT Technology Review Magazine: All the Internet’s a Game; Gamelayers makes a treasure hunt of everyday Web browsing. The article is password protected (user: cypherpunk password: cypherpunk will work for a login).

Mike Schramm gives PMOG a thorough treatment on Massively, a game about multiplayer online games: “First Impressions: PMOG, the passively multiplayer game.”

Aleks Krotoski from the Guardian reviews PMOG:

[PMOG] makes exploring the far corners of the internet more appealing, and gives a personal touch to the faceless web that makes everyday life much more fun.

Read her writeup: "Humdrum surfing just became a lot more fun".

March 2008: Mary Jane Irwin writes for Wired, a digital lifestyle magazine, covering PMOG in the Play section: “A New Type of Game Turns Web Surfing Into All-Out Information Warfare“:

“absolutely frackin’ brilliant” - Jason Calacanis on PMOG.

February 2008: PMOG was featured in Michael Arrington’s writeup on Techcrunch.com, a popular weblog covering emerging social technology: