GameLayers Launches PMOG, the Tools of the Playful Web

San Francisco - 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.

PMOG provides a web-wide platform for people to poke, gift or share links. “PMOG is arms dealer to the web,” quips Merci Victoria Grace, GameLayers Chief Creative Officer and co-founder. PMOG game events are created by other players, and layered over the web that we all share. Players see PMOG “Mines” “Crates” or “Portals” affixed to CNN, Facebook or Google. Players can unlock badges based on their web surfing on sites like BoingBoing, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. The entire internet now offers a chance to play.

An interactive PMOG tutorial teaches players how to play the game with each other across web sites. Players can send short messages to other players through their browser. An emergent PMOG community is knitting together a playful semantic web: in the last two months, PMOG players have made over 3,300 “Missions” sending players across the internet on information quests. Recent Missions on PMOG include “Awesome Knitting Sites,” “Advanced Fire-Starting Techniques” and “Burma Cyclone.” Publisher Tim O’Reilly says PMOG “is thus a bold experiment in searching out new possibilities in cyberspace” (the O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures fund has invested in GameLayers).

And now, after ten weeks in closed beta, PMOG is opening up for anyone to play online. Players can install the 200k PMOG extension in their Firefox browser, and then the game plays along with them, as they surf. PMOG offers full privacy controls, for pausing or deleting one’s playful history. Players can also hide PMOG; when hidden, the game continues to award players points for web surfing, and allow them to see game events secreted around the web. “There’s a reason we wanted to make a passively-multiplayer online game,” says GameLayers CEO and co-founder Justin Hall, “ideally we want to constantly play games but we don’t have time. A passive game is something we can play all the time, without having to pay too much attention. Plus all the data of the internet represents a fabulous social play field!”

PMOG opens on May 12, 2008 to anyone with a Firefox-based web browser: http://pmog.com/ Screenshots and more information here: http://gamelayers.com/aboutpmog. A 70 second screencast open for embedding: http://www.flickr.com/photos/justin/2486130080/, if you are logged in to Flickr.

Contact: Justin Hall, CEO, press@gamelayers.com
GameLayers, Inc.
1 Lombard Street, Suite 303
San Francisco, CA 94111
http://gamelayers.com/
+1-888-480-7664

GameLayers is a seven person virtual company based in the Bay Area. The three co-founders of GameLayers have a rich background in online publishing, casual games and virtual world building. GameLayers has been funded by disruptive tech investors O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and individuals including Richard Wolpert, former president of Disney Online and Joichi Ito, a level 70 internet citizen. Information about GameLayers can be found on http://gamelayers.com/

This release was published on openPR.