Masters of the Universe: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game

The digital age has freed information from the restrictive hierarchies of traditional cataloging methods, notably Dewey. Although libraries still deal with the challenge of physical books, 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. This article describes a new game which 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. Through Resource Description Framework (RDF), a new language for describing content semantically, one can connect bits of information to a greater degree of sophistication. 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. The task for 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 books in library catalogs, librarians need to encourage the use of tags or other methods to capture the essence of Web sites.