Passively Multiplayer
bud.com is a “passively multiplayer online role-playing game” being developed by former uber-blogger Justin Hall in which your character progresses not by slaying Orcs and gathering gold, but by surfing the Web. (Thanks to Glitchy for the link.)
This is a massively multiplayer online game that rewards you with experience points and levels for daily activities. Reading news, checking webmail, browsing a concert schedule, trolling photos, each of these web activities leaves a signature trace on the user’s avatar.
I love this idea. Basically, you level up simply by going about your daily business on the Internet. But there’s more.
Justin envisions an economy of game-related items cropping up, things you’d be given as you progressed, or which you’d collect from other people’s Web sites. Besides being fun, it’s also an interesting way to drive traffic to a site, and could create a micro-economy more of less based on novelty: since there’s really no limit to the kinds of game objects you can offer people, sites will attract visitors by having the most interesting objects rather than the most valuable.
I’m definitely signing up for this, whenever it goes live. What’s so 3pointD about it? Well, not much, really, except that it makes a virtual world/MMO out of the entire World Wide Web. It’s also something like a distributed version of social networking software, with people connecting in order to swap virtual items around. And finally, it’s a chance to link to Justin being geeksleeped. For more on the art of geeksleeping, see this post on my old blog, Walkering.com.
Feeds
i love this ideas too.
imagine if was as easy to turn on as last.fm?!?!
i’ll have some more thoughts later which i’ll post here..
altohugh my first question is what so RPG about it? seems like this is the furthest thing possible from role-playing.
I love this because it’s another step down the road to getting paid just to behave! Playing and mining ourselves for data as a job. Wild.
And hey, I was wondering when Geek Sleep would show up on 3pointD! Does it also apply to avatars falling asleep? If so, I just realized I have none other than Doug Engelbart Geek Sleeping in Second Life right here! ;) That’s live video of Doug on the center board, but his av is clearly passed out. Taken from this SL Future Salon post.