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The Nethernet has an IRC-based chat client in its toolbar. You can click on “Chat” from the toolbar while on any URL, rendering a chat window on every website. And before you join the room, you can see how many players are actually using it. For its power, this is an under-utilized feature.

Expected Use:
We thought that players would convene on their favorite websites and memes to talk about the content. We see game events huddled around I Can Haz Cheezburger?, BoingBoing, and Twitter. What we’re not seeing is groups of people showing up to these chat rooms looking for each other. Or if they are looking for each other, they join, see that no one else is around, and leave.

We had chat rooms enabled on IRC long before chat on URLs was available. We ran a room just called #pmog on irc.freenode.net. At any time, between 15 and 30 players and GameLayers, Inc. employees would be in that room. In addition to the Forums, #pmog helped the core of our community grow and develop PMOG-based activities like The Tubenauts podcast and PRisk.

Actual Use:
Rather than players consistently returning to the URL-based rooms that the chat enables, they’ve been creating rooms based on Classes and their community roles. They’ve also created meme-based rooms that function apart from any website. You can’t keep a good meme down, I guess. #ikillforbacon and #destroyers are two of the rooms that meme and game-based on irc.thenethernet.com. Each player who joins clicks on Chat is automatically logged into #thenethernet.com.

Most interestingly, we haven’t seen a big increase in the number of players using chat. Essentially the same players who met us on irc.freenode.net are with us on our own IRC server. So despite the one-click chat on every URL we haven’t actually made our chat function more accessible.

Takeaway:
Incentivize the frack out of it! Our junior developer/game designer, Alex Friedman, keeps a sticky note on his desk that says: “If you want players to do something, make it a game event.” We haven’t yet done anything to reward players who use the chat function. Additionally, The Nethernet does not yet have any kind of “group” feature. I would imagine that if players got datapoints for chatting using our client and if we had some sort of groups or guilds system, chat would be used a lot more.

Really cool to see how stuff like this plays out!

A long time ago, in a city far far away, I started working on a project called PMOG with my then-boyfriend, now-husband. It was early 2006. PMOGs would be new kinds of games, we thought, games that you could play just by using your networked device. Surveillance entertainment!

In July 2007 we incorporated the idea with our collaborator Duncan to form GameLayers, Inc. and went full steam ahead with PMOG: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game.

PMOG was like Cloverfield, a project name that became a product name because we couldn’t think of anything else.

When we decided it was way-past time to redesign our website, I sent some mock-ups to an acquaintance I’d met at a  Microsoft Research event: Jesse Alexander. As a producer of Heroes, Jesse had experience taking what suits may consider niche (superheroes) to being a household brand.

He advised me to think about another name for PMOG, something that would inspire and enthrall: “Think grand,” he wrote back. I conferred with a GameLayers advisor, Alice Taylor, who immediately agreed with the advice. “Absolutely.”

What now? Oh yeah, do what I couldn’t do for two years… think of a damn name.

Alice suggested The Underweb, but something about Under Underbelly Udder… Cow nipples. Ew! I know, easily grossed out. What is like Under but less physical? Nether! Netherweb? No, The Nethernet! Hey, if someone smarter than you does 90% of the work, it’s not that hard to do the rest.

I made a logo with the website-cum-Victorian buildings we’d just gotten from the amazing Colin Adams and showed it to Kristin Nienhuis, our fabulous UI/UE Designer. She lit up immediately; it was good! I showed it to Jesse and Alice; it was still good! Yay!

I had to convince my co-founders and then we began in earnest to flesh out the new website. So now the Victorian clusterfuck of a city that the internet has become in my imagination is finally alive: http://thenethernet.com.

Now I’m very excited to not have to spend the first 5 minutes of any conversation parsing out a four-letter acronym of a new genre of game that’s a lot like another genre of game also defined by a four-letter acronym and then explain the clever-but-small-but-important difference between a PMOG and an MMOG.

The Nethernet is a PMOG, it’s true. But The Nethernet is also a game world, a place of fun and fantasy and alternate reality. I am stoked about the future and direction of The Nethernet.