Masters of the Universe: the Passively Multiplayer Online Game

Given the choice, would you promote order or chaos? Not good or evil, mind you, but the absolute structure of order versus the free-flowing randomness of chaos. This may seem to be a rhetorical question for librarians, but let me take this opportunity to speak in support of chaos. Shocking, I know, but it just might be the next big thing for libraries.

The digital age has freed information from the restrictive hierarchies of traditional cataloging methods, notably Dewey, as David Weinberger asserts in his 2007 tome Everything Is Miscellaneous (Times Books). Although libraries still deal with the challenge of physical books (and happily so, I might add), online content is a different matter. Thanks to the unregulated, grassroots cataloging effort known as tagging, the Web presents a glorious chaos of interconnected knowledge, where associations that might otherwise have been lost with formal cataloging are now possible.

A new game is pushing this concept even further, encouraging participants to creatively make connections between Web sites, with the vast expanse of the Internet as their playing field. A free activity requiring only a Firefox extension, PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, turns Web browsing into a social adventure, in which players—striving for order or chaos—forge alliances, do battle, and create missions, all while surfing the Net. With the PMOG add-on installed, even the most mundane Google search can earn you experience points toward achieving a higher level, reveal a treasure trove of information, or explode a havoc-wreaking mine, warping your browser window in a temporary effect.

PMOG offers a number of tools to assist you during gameplay and your choices determine what PMOGian character you turn out to be. Working for the forces of order, defining structure and offering guidance, are the Pathmakers. They place lightposts on Web sites, illuminating great resources for fellow gamers. Others, however, may opt to pursue chaos, planting mines on sites that subtract experience points from unsuspecting players who land there. Place too many mines and your character type may evolve into a Destroyer.

Before you turn off completely at the very idea of hiding mines on the Internet, think about this: What if a Destroyer mined a source that contained misinformation? Imagine using the game to let people know they have made a bad selection from a Google search, prompting them to revisit their information-seeking strategy.

Consider another chaotic character, the Seer, who has the ability to build portals between sites. These links redirect players brave (or foolish) enough to click on the portal to an undisclosed site. While a Seer can place a portal as a joke (see “Irwin the Destroyer,” below), others use these pathways to highlight hidden connections or make a point. As a Seer, for example, you could place a portal on Google that leads to a resource about alternative search engines.

If planting lightposts is more your style, become a Pathmaker and link a string of them to connect online content. Using a PMOG interface, players can annotate lightposts and their connections in creating a mission for other players to follow. But this linear process—in contrast to the portal approach of the Seer—almost ensures that something will be missed. I’m not suggesting that libraries stop creating pathfinders or subject guides to help library patrons find resources. But as surface information becomes more accessible to casual searchers, libraries must mine the deep Web and create portals that link seemingly unrelated bits of data and promote greater understanding of a topic. This dual approach to research, linear pathfinders and serendipitous portals, make PMOG a great professional tool for librarians.

These concepts aren’t just about a game. PMOG is just a hint of what’s to come across the Internet. Powerful metadata makes it possible to better assess site content through semantic analysis. Semantics, the study of meaning in language, allows searchers to see the possibilities of deeper connections. In a digital sense, rich semantic metadata can allow search engines to try and clarify a user’s intended meaning and desired results as part of the search process.

Let’s say a user is looking for historical information. Then a search for Lincoln and Ford would need to return sites about the assassination of President Lincoln and not cars. At the same time, however, semantic connections can also provide links to information about the assassin John Wilkes Booth. Semantics can also reveal more chaotic connections. While a PMOGian Pathmaker might place lightposts to guide users toward pages about Booth and the fallout from the assassination, a chaotic Seer might go in other directions. Perhaps a searcher would be interested in a link to the script for Our American Cousin, the play Lincoln was watching that fateful evening. This seemingly random connection provides historical context, not only for the evening of the assassination, but also for the society and culture of that time.

Through Resource Description Framework (RDF), a new language for describing content semantically, we can connect bits of information to a greater degree of sophistication. The following statements represent a sort of RDF code:

• Lincoln was a president
• Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre
• Lincoln was shot by Booth
• Our American Cousin is a play
• Lincoln was shot while watching Our American Cousin

The difference between these RDF statements and the subject headings with which we are familiar is that RDF defines a relationship between the resource and the topic. Instead of simply labeling a book with the tag Lincoln, RDF establishes whether the book is written by Lincoln, has Lincoln as a character, or is about Lincoln from a third-person view.

Collectively, the surge of new applications and protocols that supports the emergence of this rich metadata is referred to as the Semantic Web or Web 3.0. The next step will be to define new search structures that make use of RDF and semantic connections. Yahoo! is already working on RDF search support, so expect to begin mining the rich metadata of the Web soon. Our task as librarians is to contribute the semantic metadata through both description and linking. Just as with subject headings that go beyond keyword searches in defining the “aboutness” of books in our catalogs, we need to encourage the use of tags or other methods to capture the essence of Web sites.

Moreover, we need to provide direct linking to quality sites to help move patrons beyond the first page of search results and enable them to discover the hidden gems online. By creating pathfinder-like missions in PMOG and littering the Web with chaotic portal connections to encourage serendipitous discoveries, librarians can find and define the connections between bits of information at a deeper conceptual level. As you continue to build connections and illuminate quality resources with your own lightposts, don’t forget to also consider the chance findings and random connections that can provide a deeper understanding about the information being researched. Oh, and watch out for those mines!