What happened? It’s all gone…. my missions, my data points, a truly innovative use of the web… disparu. The only notification I got was when a wandering group of internet refugees contacted me:
Meanwhile I [dav2] am on
a quest
to find out why PMOG failed, and what can be done about it.
PMOG was a fascinating idea to take the drive of gameplayers (videogamers) and channel
all that energy into sifting the internet, doing productive reaserch.A core of disgruntled and hopeful former users can be found at
A most useful post on the official gamelayers site:
GameLayers has retired The Nethernet. A hearty thanks to all our players, rivals and allies alike! Stay tuned as GameLayers prepares to announce their next project.
Way to go, GameLayers. See if I invest any time, energy, or free publicity blogging about your stuff, ever again.
Electric Archaeology 
Hi Shawn – thanks for playing with PMOG / The Nethernet and making Missions to share trails across the web. It was an exciting world our players created and it’s too bad the game couldn’t grow to support itself.
For our next game Dictator Wars, we’ve tackled geopolitics and social gaming within Facebook. http://apps.facebook.com/dictatorwars – continuing to iterate on asynchronous gameplay, with more clear goals and measurable achievement within the game world.
I did some writing about our transition from PMOG / The Nethernet to Dictator Wars, and the lessons we learned: http://interactive.usc.edu/members/jhall/archives/2009/09/gamelayers_from.html
Hi Justin,
Sorry for the disgruntledness (if that’s a word) at the end of my post. I didn’t find your explanation (the one on interactive.usc.edu) when I examined your site; perhaps a bit more along those lines for the people who were quite excited about the potential of the Nethernet…. have you thought of an iPhone port, keep the game going in that regard…?
Hi Shawn – we have definitely talked about mobile gaming and The Nethernet. I think the challenge is to make a mobile game that works with the mobile experience. So when we talk about a client for The Nethernet, or a The Nethernet-like experience on the mobile, it seems like something we’d want to build from scratch, and not just a web frontend to see what comments people are leaving on your web-toolbar Missions.
There are a few mobile games that feature interesting play across space, for example Mogi:
http://thefeaturearchives.com/100501.html (from 2004)
and http://www.parallelkingdom.com/ (on the iPhone)
Right now we’re focused on making a success of Dictator Wars, but we do have some other games cooking up in our kitchen :-D Thanks for the feedback about an iPhone client – I’ll add your vote to our counting :-)
It’s too bad, really… it was a great way to learn about anything! If only it had had more publicity : /