PMOG was launched by GameLayers, who said in a statement this morning:

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.

You know what that means, don't you? You are all part of a game, right now. You can feel it when you go to work. When you pay your taxes. When you quote that cool speech in the Matrix for the fiftieth time. So make your web surfing count by checking out PMOG and going on a quest.

PMOG [official site]

In Merci's words:

PMOG is an asynchronous, peripheral game that transforms the Firefox browser into an MMO head up display and invites the player to engage in warfare, socializing, and annotation on the world wide web through html.

Is PMOG the future? Is the Internet going to become a vast multiplayer game?

The internet is already a vast multiplayer game, PMOG just makes that obvious and tangible. There are player types (Wikipedia nannies versus forum griefers), there's social cuing based on a the presentation of self online (avatars, profiles on social networking sites), When I designed PMOG I approached the problem of making an MMO in a browser by first realizing that the internet is already a place. It's an environment with its own architecture, languages, and customs. The gameplay and story flowed from that decision.

What kind of story did you devise to overlay/explain/narratize the internet in PMOG? It looks pretty steampunk - is that the genre? Any plans to evolve the story over time?

When I began designing PMOG, I started with the environment of the internet. It struck me that the internet is this kind of awful urban sprawl. Buildings (websites) go up in a matter of days with no building codes or aesthetic oversight. There's no organizing principle apart from the most basic rules of the world - html operates like gravity. If it loads, I guess it's okay. There is no government building roads and schools, keeping the streets lit at night, putting on parades, or punishing criminals. But despite this lawlessness there are some highly functioning and beautiful structures, there's magic and technology living side-by-side. That concert of magic and tech speaks well through steampunk. Additionally, I took a lot of Victorian literature in college. And aesthetically, I'm tired of everything being fantasy or flat anime-esque children. Over the course of the time that PMOG runs I'll continue to develop the story and the world, eventually adding non-player characters and more advanced interactions.

You can sign up for the PMOG beta. If you were PMOGing, you would already have earned experience for reading this post.