I graduated in May 2007. I'd been working with two other folks on my thesis, Merci Hammon and Duncan Gough. The three of us formed a company called GameLayers. We were able to get an investment in the Fall, and since then we've been bent over our computers evolving this vision for web fun.

We've taken PMOG from of being a sidebar and instead we've made a sort of lightweight HUD, in the form of a toolbar that sits at the bottom of your Firefox browser. So it takes up less screen space, disappears easily, and hopefully feels like a ready way to have fun during a day online.

The revised PMOG interface, a toolbar instead of a sidebar.

Finally in January we started beta testing. And there's a few IMD folks in there already - testing the play boundaries, trying everything once, and giving good feedback. Much obliged!

I comb our beta registration logs for @usc email addresses, but some folks in the IMD use GMail, etc. If you're interested in playing and you haven't gotten an invite, sign up on pmog.com and drop me a line! justin at gamelayers d0tcom :-D I'd love to hear what you think.

(They need better video editing tools, and most definitely the ability to view the clips on the web! Right now, the clips are only viewable through Halo 3 on the Xbox 360. Maybe that's the only audience that cares. Except Halo 3 veterans at work. They're probably waiting to see how popular this feature is, and might expand it later for optional additional $$$, maybe when Halo is growing long in the tooth. Hopefully not too long!)

Anyhow, to tie this all back to the Interactive Media Division:

A blogger Kato figured out how to render Halo 3 screenshots in 3D. Here's a red/cyan stereo version:

He's also rendered cross-eyed viewing and parallel viewing. Sounds like a 3D veteran! He's posted a tutorial: How To: Make Stereo 3D Halo 3 Screenshots.

Thanks, Duncan from Passively Multiplayer blog, for the link.

Transitioning those friends to "online friends" is tough - you have to find out if they have the right computer or console, then you have to get some kind of a friend code that allows you to make a connection. Email is a fairly useful lingua-franca, but I've met alarming numbers of teenagers who don't use email at all these days.

So with so many online games today, it's a miracle to find and play alongside anyone you know. This is one of the things I just hate about World of Warcraft - I would love to play. But should I play on the server with my nephews? Or on a server with game critics? Or on a server with international friends? Why do I have to choose which one to be friends with? And have separate characters to interface with each group.

Xbox Live has fabulous means of watching any kind of friend. What are they up to? Can I join them? How are they doing at their games? It's a sort of light-touch online friendship. Light co-presence.

But Xbox Live needs richer real-time grouping. I couldn't gather more than one other friend in a voice chatroom during an online game. We were split into separate teams and couldn't talk. We had to get ourselves back into groups after a match ended, if the host wanted to change the game settings. So there was a sense that we were at an online gaming party, but we had to keep leaving and re entering the party, and we could never been in the same room.

In YoHoHo Puzzle Pirates and Bang! Howdy I didn't know anyone there immediately. I made some friends in Bang! Howdy, and I could find them later. But it was generally somewhat sparsely populated-seeming. It would have been nice to see a central gathering place, where the bodies mill about in Bang! Howdy. Then again, in Puzzle Pirates, I was quickly thrown into a large area with bodies milling about and I wasn't able to make much of it. Except other people had much bigger parrots than I had, and better clothes. Something to aspire to, I guess!

When we launched the alpha version of Passively Multiplayer Online Game, PMOG for short, we got some feedback that it needs community. At that time, we had a news weblog and I don't think the comments even worked.

Within a week of that post, we had real-time chat in the sidebar, and forums for people's questions. A few weeks later, we had a public wiki where our design documents live so people could see our plans and give feedback.

The two game designers (myself and Duncan Gough) we're often available in sidebar chat. There's a few other users who have stepped up and answered questions in our absence, which has been splendid.

We don't have events, or cyclical content yet, both nice things to build community and revitalize the game world. We're launching new core features each week or two these days. I think to myself, "we've got such big plans" but clearly community maintenance is critical to the development of the game from day one. We're building a massively multiplayer online game, and we have over 600 signups since March 1, and over 130 active users today. Right now those users are the core of our meetings, performances and competitions! And we will endeavor to build ways for them to continue stimulating each other.

Now the Warlords developer Infinite Interactive has replaced rock-paper-scissors with a more immediate form of fun - lining up colored bits. Can you find three in a row of the same color? Proceeding in the lineage of Connect Four, Tetris, past Puzzle Bobble, into Bejeweled and Zuma and Luxor. Matching colored tiles! With experience points and epic story mapped over them.

In comments on Joystiq, Thrawn writes: "Stay away! The game is too addictive. The RPG components make you feel like you're getting something done." Ahah! Where have we heard this before?

Or, as Penny Arcade put it: "The competitive mode certainly has a luck component - we are talking about a genetic descendant of Bejeweled, after all - but the abilities, equipment, and skill loadouts layered over it do much to rein in that chaotic force. They seem to be gesturing at the broad outline of a vast genre here, one whose sensual contours entice."

I believe I've seen the same vast genre - mapping experience points and items onto other forms of computer activity. Xbox Live added points for playing games and created the Xbox Achievements meta-game. Seriosity has added experience points and currency for items. Amazon's Askville has added quests and experience points and levels for web searching. With Duncan Gough, I'm adding experience points, levels and items to ordinary web surfing: we call it "Passively Multiplayer Online Games."

So let's look at what we have here in Puzzle Quest: epic fantasy trappings, boilerplate kingdom-in-danger story, Westernized-anime art, Gregorian chants and early music loops. It's a bit hard on the eyes, maybe hard on the soul - I'm 32 years old. I've read Tolkien, Pullman, Martin, Weis & Hickman, even Jordan. I don't find fantasy retread comforting; I feel like my life is slipping away faster than normal when I am saving unremarkable kingdoms.

Still they must be commended for using what must have been a small budget and a dedicated team to make an indie game that is widely selling out and causing people such gaming excitement. Probably, if I'd spent more time playing Bejeweled, like Thrawn perhaps, I would say, "ah yes! Finally, Bejeweled that matters!" But I am not a colored tile matcher by nature.

It's an intruiging construction - instead of players picking from menus of commands to solve conflicts in an RPG, slap in a totally orthogonal mini-game. A bit like Puzzle Pirates, hmmm? In Puzzle Quest there's no conceit for the setting - me and a skeleton pulling out our boards and laying out our tokens? Penny Arcade drew up the same question:

The game could have appealed to me by embracing the minigame game I played against Zombies and bats and rats and so forth - showing them toting their gamepieces, all of us somehow beholden to strange three-in-a-row rules. Or, if it had a sense of humor. Where's the Keef the Thief today? Even Might and Magic had surrealist wit about their bad guys - fighting killer Cuisinarts and so forth.

Our teacher, Patricia Pizer, had us play this Puzzle Quest game for homework. She asked, what other theme could we map on to it?

Contender Quest: Stevedore's Waterfront Puzzle

Let's try On the Waterfront the Elia Kazan film about mob ties to the longshoremen in 1940s New York. This is a fitting theme, since the game board can be a bird's-eye view of men moving shopping containers to make similar shipments stick together, or to trap mafiosi or cops inbetween them, etc.

Players could choose a character class: longshoreman, priest, petty criminal, police cadet. Then they each try to work within the warehouses to straighten out corruption and making transnational freight more efficient. Noble quests such as "find the missing shrimp shipment before it goes bad" and "somewhere in that warehouse is a load of insulin for diabetic children."

Your foes could be time (perishable goods), cops, mafiosi, hobos, informants, miscreants, ne'er-do-wells, a wide range of villiany awaiting their chance to rise above the orcs and rats we've slain too many times.

Experience points is a perfect system to map onto this profession: can you rise from Longshoreman to Stevedore? Can you earn the golden cap and hook?

Applying these ideas to services I've already explored:

Xbox Live (my review): currently, a very basic buddy list, with game statistics. Not much of a sense of history (except externally, 360voice.com), and not much of a sense of geography. There's four areas you can play in, basically people sorting themselves by levels of competition and profanity they want in their games. But between genres of game, physical location, activity levels, Xbox Live could foster more community and exploration through visualization. Who do I end up playing with? Who plays the same games and gets the same achievements as me?

Much of the time, I end up playing Xbox Live with a number of the same friends; could the system help me visualize when those matchups happen? I could see a pattern of Thursday nights, after 9pm, for example, and begin to carve out that time for a regular meeting.

There's no way to make any kind of group, clan, alliance, friendship circle within Xbox Live. If you created those groups, perhaps that could foster a sense of meta-game. "15,000 gamer points by April 2007" group. Sort of like the spontaneous overlapping groups of Flickr, for example. This presumes that Xbox Live would like to give people incentives to form relationships.

One example Steele talked about: There's Friends Lists, what about Rivals lists? That guy always kicks my ass - I would definitely have a list of those dudes in online shooters, then I would be happy if I ever beat them.

Bang! Howdy (my review): The town is empty, until you get to the saloon. There's a static bit of town art, maybe the saloon could light up or show horses outside if a number of people were outside. Also, show signs of other players in the other areas of the game. The interface is currently very lightweight; currently it's so lightweight it doesn't give much opportunity to connect with players except in a single focused instance.

Although when you play Settlers of Catan for the first time your first impression is mainly of the map and pieces, the heart of the game system is the trading – the wheeling and dealing with other players is a major driver in making the game fun. So a huge concern for us was creating a "trading" interface which would not only allow players to trade, but which would also make sure players would have fun while trading. We did a lot of versions of this screen, and spent a lot of time in one of our local University's user testing labs while getting this screen just right.

The author of the interview, by the way, is Scott Jon Siegel, who seems to have worked with some fantastic game companies and weblogs, and has published some fascinating sounding game designs on his numberless web site. He won one of the GDC 2007 scholarships, so he'll be in San Francisco next week.

McQuaid isn’t pinning his hopes on appealing to World of Warcraft’s millions of casual players. Instead, Vanguard is a gamer’s game. While World of Warcraft uses a cartoony visual style that runs fine on slower computers, Vanguard can humble even the beefiest PC with its emphasis on fantasy realism and its huge, richly detailed virtual universe. Where the older game tries to impress with its accessibility, Vanguard is about more complexity, more choices.

The Diplomacy track sounds most immediately interesting: a game mechanic around persuasive communications which can earn you status and strength apart from killing or crafting.

[The game's designer] says he’s going after “players who are looking for something deeper, more like a home.”

Wow - I want to experiment with this game, but I already have a home! The reviews say it's buggy and demanding. I wonder if I have the patience? 61 on MetaCritic so far.

from CNet: "Game start-up says anthropology is its guide." Looks like drop-in, simple, multi-player, puzzle games played for points which can be redeemed for prizes. Membership is free, but Club Winnie offers more opportunities for play and faster point earning. Sounds a bit like the Three Rings model! And the middle-ager casual games portals I remember hearing about in Korea - I wonder if Winster has avatars?

This flurry of activity should result in a lot more games that we can play without launching big client softwares and signing up for demanding commitments. Appropriately, veteran web developer Andrew Wooldridge has designed a system for embedding bits of fantasy role-playing across web sites. Web masters become game masters, and surfers become players. Something I look forward to implementing with Passively Multiplayer!

Andrew calls his project "Itty Bitty RPG." It's a glimpse of web wide play; right now the gameplay and objects are localized to each site. Andrew says he's working on a way to securely allow people to carry their characters around the web as they surf. Itty Bitty Multiplayer! He's released the entire project-in-progress as open source and there's a discussion group and code repository online. You could install an itty bitty RPG on your pages right now! Wow.

Recently I finished a work deadline, and I looked at my stack of games. I wanted to play something. I realized: I was thinking "which one of these games will give me some quick Gamerpoints?" Because with 4370 I'm towards the top of my community, but friends of mine who have jobs are closing in on me.

My 360 badge: Mass Effect promotional icon, "zone" underground (which means I don't mind cussing and freaking out online), and my Questerian personal slogan.

Most of the games for Xbox 360 I play tend to feature shooting, imperialism and saving the world. Power Fantasy stuff. This is a console that feels much more tough and "hardcore" than, say, the Nintendo Wii. I will admit enjoying escapist capitalist entertainment, but I believe the community features of the machine redeem the aggressive character of the 360.

Even when I am working, away from games, I check in on my community: I can load my list of friends, and see what they're up to:

A view of my buddy list from my web browser, from Spring 2006; what movie was Nicksthings watching? Xbox 360 needs to tap a CDDB-type service for DVDs for further social surveillance.

And I can message my gaming friends from the web, dropping them a text note. Of course, typing any kind of response back using a controller is a pain, so I don't often get more than a few words back. Short words. Misspelled short words. If they reply with voice, which is easier, I can't listen through my web browser. Heck, it's a miracle it works in Firefox on a Mac. So the communication is there, but it's imbalanced.

I check my Xbox Live friends list on the web usually once a day, in the late afternoon or evening. On weekends, I might check Xbox Live at 10am to see if someone is tacitly giving me permission to hit the sauce early.

My Xbox Live web page tells me which of my friends is busy kicking ass, and what games are popular or persistent. I'm often looking for a certain group of friends who live in another city and occasionally get online to play Halo 2; I check the web browser to see if I can join up with my buddies in Clan Fragitz. But perhaps they are all checking the web site, waiting for someone else to start playing first? Xbox 360 should ship a version with a hard drive loaded up with Halo 2, so you can play a single player game, and then shift to the good old shooter without leaving the couch.

I spent assloads of time on Xbox 360, but my most lively online console gaming memories come from Halo 2 on the antique Xbox. There's been no game I've spent as much time with, nor encountered so many provocative strangers in. Halo 2 still provides an un-matched testosteronal license to abuse people. Or maybe just not enough of my Fragitz-friends have a 360 and Gears of War.

Tracking and publishing my gaming statistics, combined with the social surveillance of seeing my friends' gamer statistics, has me hooked. I don't want to play games any more, unless I'm getting experience points for it. Experience Points outside the game!

And, I find gaming on older systems, or on my PC so lonely. I can't play with my friends! Even if we're not playing the same game, I like seeing that KimP is bangin' with his homies in Saints Row, or J and Bevin are inbreeding and promoting cannibalism in Viva Piñata. Co-play through light surveillance.

There are drawbacks: kinks in the design. I can't search for emails and real names of friends to find them and make them my Xbox buddies. My name is "Just In Queso" but you might not remember that, or remember to type in all the spaces between words.

Many games, even if you sign on to play them together, they're not well designed. Each game has its own lobby, before and after a match; oftentimes it's hard to arrange to play together, and then the game scatters the players to winds when the match is over. It's like the designers didn't have time to actually spend night after night, six pack within reach, melding their ass with a sofa, developing a sense of community with their dev kit.

Today I'm developing a game that rewards people with experience points for web surfing and creates a sense of gentle competition between web surfers. The Xbox Live meta-game of scoring and watching other people score is one of the strongest influences on my experience design.

To see other players you'll have to visit the saloon. There, people's avatars appear in chat scrolls. You can click on them to see their wanted posters: a mix of their fancy duds and the badges they've earned for being the fastest mini-strategy gunner in the West.

This is Bang! Howdy a casual MMO-flavored set of mini-strategy games. A cheeky entertaining Wild West skin with customizable avatars and chat, wrapped around the game equivalent of turn-based dodgeball meets rock paper scissors.

Special, more powerful units and temporary power-up cards are available for sale - you can buy them with the money you earn in games, or money you buy with money.

There's a healthy range of personalization - many different wardrobe pieces and badges. The matches are in 3D, but the game itself is 2D, so that flat art is easy to expand upon.

there wasn't much of a sense of their avatar affecting the in-game play. Avatars/profiles seemed more like a trophy case. It would have been nice to see an eye-patch wearing woman in a sombrero up and kicking my ass, besides that small cameo for the scoreboard down at the bottom.

The matches are pretty simple to play and difficult to master; the personalization is varied but the opportunities to show off are somewhat limited. This is a lobby-based game, more than an MMO. Everyone goes to the saloon for matchups, so you can see some random faces drift by the primary chat scroll. But it's all tumbleweeds in the other areas of the game.

Still, Bang Howdy! was a lively experience that loaded up in Java and let me start playing on my Mac laptop in approximately 90 seconds. The writing, music and art are fun and catchy. I could play here and there thoughtout the day, without a huge commitment. I spent $10 on a good load of gold to help me get started; less than I spend keeping my (dormant) World of Warcraft account. Good luck to 'em!

Bang! Howdy official Site (Bang! Howdy on Wikipedia) is an independent MMO-strategy game published by Three Rings Games, the online games craftsmen behind YoHoHo Puzzle Pirates. It came out of beta in December 2006.

Now my Mom has been invited to South Africa to see the opening of this school over New Year's 2006-2007. She has an invitation +1, and my stepfather and my brother both opted to let me go, since I've never been to Africa south of Morocco and they both have.

Oprah, lions, hippos, hot air balloon rides, I needed a camera solution. I thought about bringing a nice still camera and my old camcorder. Carrying and charging up two cameras bothered me, so did logging and capturing hours of footage as I was on my way out of Africa and back to school at the IMD.

Long ago in the midst of taping with my 2003-era Sony PC-101, I declared I would never buy a tape-based camera again. Coming up on this trip I decided I might re-outfit for road video.

Sony HDR-SR1

After consulting with Kenyatta Cheese, I decided to splurge on a Sony HDR-SR1 camera. It's Sony's first high definition, hard-drive based camcorder.

Kenyatta had worked with an artist at Eyebeam who had gotten great use out of this camera. The HDR-SR1 seemed to fit most all my criteria: smallish, hard drive based, high definition, headphone jack, microphone jack, under $1500 at Samy's on Venice. You can tape 4 hours of high def onto the hard drive without changing tapes once! You can tape 27 hours of standard definition onto the harddrive without changing tapes once!

Then when you go to edit or look through the footage, it's already a file on a portable hard drive, drag it to your computer. No more logging and capturing! Or at least, just renaming files. Or tagging them! All meta-data.

What this camera, and all camcorders need, by the way, is in-camera, during filming meta-data. I want to be able to tag a moment "funny" or "violent" or just mark when the peak moment was - just after the moment passed. Or during downtime with the camera, give scenes titles and list the people in them (drawn from my mobile phone buddy list, perhaps?).

Total life integration aside, there's one primary drawback to this shiny new camera: no compatibility with Macintosh computers running OSX. The camera uses a new AVCHD format, meaning the videos are written to the camera's hard drive in a video language that Apple doesn't yet speak. So I can drag them to my hard drive (which the manual says I shouldn't do - I should use their software to migrate the files onto this drive). Then I double click on them - the standard definition files play without sound (because of Muxing, I believe). The high definition files are a complete mystery to my MacBook Pro.

Apple, Microsoft, Sony Conga Line

I'm thinking I might be able to hack my way through that - I got the Sony Picture Motion Browser software running through Windows XP running with Parallels on my MacBook Pro. Holy smokes! It's like three layers of computer magic - Apple, Microsoft, Sony in my video production conga line.

I fixed my documents to point to a shared portion of my Mac hard drive, but only after I'd set the defaults up for the Sony Picture Motion Browser. Now I can see tiny iconic glimpses of my footage, but none will play back in the Sony software. An erase and restart might be called for in that regard - hum.

Even if I can coax my computer to play the footage back in Windows, I still won't be able to edit properly in Final Cut, without decreasing the quality through some voodoo encoding to get Apple to speak AVCHD. So I'll write a long blog post so the next sucka who searches for HDR-SR1 OSX or "parallels hdr-sr1" discovers they are not alone and maybe we can pool knowledge and whup this new format.

From what I've read, new video formats face a few months of limbo before they're incorporated. AVCHD is supported by Sony and Panasonic, so hopefully it's not going away. My plane lands back from South Africa and Botswana about 30 minutes into Steve Jobs's MacWorld keynote, so I'll have my fingers crossed that I'll be able to actually view and edit the footage I'm shooting.