the digital pallette and PMOG

http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/chess/index.html

while a webcomic or two has been mentioned or brought up in class, i thought i'd bring up one of the first guys to experiment with what someone coined "the digital pallette." Scott McCloud is a rather famous comic writer, partly for his forays into the digital pallette frontier, and partly for his use of the comic book page format to present critical essays on everything from the media, to game theory, to comics themselves.

http://www.gamelayers.com/pmog/

my second link is to a brief summary of Gamelayers.com new creation - the PMOG, or Passively Multiplayer Online Game. A spin off of the originally coined MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) of the late nineties and early ot's, the idea behind this game is that all the stereotypical actions that take place in a "role-playing game" are triggered as you surf the web, and are reported to you in a taskbar add-on to Firefox. neat-o I say, but it's damn difficult to figure out how everything works - though that's expected when dealing with an entirely new genre of anything. still, the idea is incredibly compelling - turning the entire internet into an enormous set of data which then translates to meaningful play. if everyone in the world had PMOG, would countries begin Mining the websites in order to cripple their web traffic? Would special interest groups hire out droves of Vigilante organizations in order to protect their bank websites, and the Wikipedia articles? Sure, it'll never happen, but it's a pretty sweet idea.

-jon