What is a PBBG? Persistent browser-based games, explained

PBBG stands for persistent browser-based game. It is the small, stubborn genre that sits between a text MUD and an MMO: you play it in a browser tab with no download and no client, and the world does not pause when you close it.

What makes a game a PBBG

The label is used loosely, but four things show up in almost every game that wears it.

• It runs in a tab. No installer, no launcher, no graphics card. That is a design constraint as much as a delivery choice: a game you can open at a bus stop is a game built out of decisions rather than reflexes.
• The world is persistent and shared. There is one city, one economy and one set of other players, all of them making moves while you are elsewhere. Nothing resets between sessions.
• Time is a resource. Energy, nerve and health refill on a clock, so the limit on what you can do today is the day itself. That is why a PBBG is played in short visits over months rather than in long evenings over a week.
• Progress is long, and mostly economic. Stats, equipment, property and reputation accumulate slowly, and most of what is worth having is bought with money earned from other players rather than dropped by the game.

Where the genre came from

PBBGs are the web's branch of the text-game family tree. MUDs put a persistent shared world behind a text interface in the late 1970s; when the browser arrived, the same idea was rebuilt out of forms and page loads instead of a telnet session. The genre's best-known game has been running continuously for over twenty years, which is the most interesting fact about it: these games are not built to be finished, and the good ones outlive several generations of games that were.

Why people still play them

Because the format is honest about what it asks for. A PBBG wants ten minutes, a few times a day, indefinitely — not an evening, not a raid night, not a sixty-hour campaign. What it gives back is the thing large games struggle to keep: a world small enough that you recognise the names in the chat window, an economy where your money came out of somebody else's pocket, and consequences that are still there tomorrow.

MeowStreets is one of them

MeowStreets is a persistent browser-based crime RPG where every player is a street cat in one shared city. Crimes cost nerve and pay cash; training costs energy; courses and jobs run on timers that finish while you are away; the market, the crews, the bounties and the heists are all other players. It is free, there is nothing to download, and it installs to a phone home screen.

The whole rule set is public: the crimes and their odds, the equipment, the gyms, the courses and the hideouts are all generated from the running game's own tables. Open the city and make your own luck.