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+--- Thread: Where the Winds of PBM meet the Play-By-Mail Mountain (/showthread.php?tid=708)
Where the Winds of PBM meet the Play-By-Mail Mountain - GrimFinger - 06-22-2013
Having all of those old issues of Paper Mayhem on my desk definitely helped. If nothing else, they provided a ready stash of food for thought.
Over the last several days, I have pondered on things PBM. Specifically, there have been two things which have been the subject of my play by mail thought patterns.
The first of these is that, of the remaining Play-By-Mail games still active, a number of these share something in common - namely, predetermined start-up positions. Hyborian War, Middle-earth PBM, and even the recently resurrected Alamaze all fall into this category, to name a few that come immediately to mind.
The second of these is that some of the more promising entrants into the quasi-PBM fray, such as Far Horizons, Rimworlds, Empyrean Cluster Wars, Ilkor: Dark Rising, and Fate of a Nation appear to be either dead or their development has slowed to a crawl. Both Rimworlds and Empyrean Cluster Wars seem to still be out there, making sporadic progress, but news from these beasts is few and far between.
We will soon be entering the second half of 2013, and from all appearances, it will be another year of drought for those seeking a new crop of PBM games to whet their appetite with.
PlayByMail.Net is one to talk, though, huh?
Week after week of bone dry emptiness. A mere hull of what it could have been, by now. What was it about the blind leading the blind?
With the vats of irony overflowing, with plenty for all to drink, the wheels of play by mail gaming continue to turn at their cosmically slow pace.
In our home, Red Dead Redemption and Injustice: Gods Among Us are the latest two entrants into my son's PlayStation 3 video game collection. But, the PBM cupboard is bare, as far as new entrants into the genre are concerned.
Where's Ryan Probert and Debellos Invinco, when you need them?
Site user, Ixnay, has set off down the path of game development for his project, Event Horizon. Rome was not built in a day, however, and neither will Event Horizon take form quite that quick - assuming that it ever comes to fruition, at all.
Over all of PBMdom, the pallor of doubt was cast, long ago. It is in that haze, that a term used in describing black holes gave birth to the spark of creation in Ixnay. It was not, however, a dream born yesterday. Browsing the quiet remnants of the PBM Gamer forum, today, I took note of Ixnay's words recorded there. The wheels in his mind have been turning the sands of imagination for more than a couple of years, it seems. I wish him well on his journey across the vast plains of game development. May he not get lost in pursuit of his objective.
Middle-earth with its twenty-five player positions, and Hyborian War with its thirty-six player positions, represent a degree of thought and complexity that strikes me as missing from much of the PBM-esque offerings that have appeared on the PBM horizon in recent years.
Somebody had to come up with all of the characters and information contained in the kingdom start-ups for Hyborian War and Middle-earth. How very time consuming it must have been - and without the Internet at one's disposal to facilitate such undertakings. Somebody had to move mountains. Somebody had to do the grunt work.
Programming is, I suspect, grunt work, even on the very best of days. Lots of mundane code to write. How does one create a PBM work of art out of the techno-babble of programming language, anyway? Your guess is as good as mine.
If play by mail is to rise once more, then someone is going to have to move a few mountains. Somebody's got to ante up, and step up to the plate, and do the grunt work necessary to turn an idea into an actual reality.
Right about now is when one begins to realize just how desolate that PBM space is.
We're all alone out here, you and I - and whomever else just might wander by this way.
I can't program. I just don't have the knack for it. I wouldn't even know where to begin. That's one mountain that this man cannot move - cannot hope to move.
But, I can fire up the engines on this editorial page, once more. It won't give you a new PBM game to play, but it will give you something new to read, when next you drop by this site.
It's been many months, since I last heard any news about the relaunch of PBM Universal by Bob McLain. Perhaps it was simply never meant to be. Just one of many rumors that blow in the PBM winds.
Whatever direction that these winds may blow, may you always enjoy the breeze.
RE: Where the Winds of PBM meet the Play-By-Mail Mountain - ixnay - 06-27-2013
another installation of the Grimfinger fare we all know and love.
couple of comments:
Largely thanks to your site, I have discovered numerous actively-played PBM games and PBM-likes that I never would have known about otherwise. I am heartened by this -- there is action to be found, and a global (if small) base of players out there. From recent posts, I checked out Fall of Rome and am rather eager to give that one a try, for instance. Looks brilliant. And I might dip my toes into Phoenix again. Just out of curiosity, are you actively playing any games at the moment?
As for game development, it's a hobby niche, and one unlikely to every make enough money to live on. If, for example, I put forth a burst of effort and finished off a half-decent version of Event Horizon, in my wildest imagination I could only imagine a dedicated player base of maybe 50 people, paying at most $100 throughout the course of a year for whatever I can provide. That's $5k a year -- not something I can imagine devoting full-time resources to. Maybe expanding into mobile app-space, adding advertisements, etc, that could go up, but that's pure speculation. So basically, this is all a labor of love, and most of us can only devote what time permits. I plan to justify some escalation in hours on Event Horizon because it will serve as an example of my developer-chops, should I ever be looking for a job again.
I imagine the same calculus is going on with those other games you mentioned. Even reviving that Far Horizons game is going to be an intense effort -- Ramblurr says it has something like 24k lines of C code, along with 1-2k lines of Python in the utilities he added. Converting that to run on Windows is a non-trivial task. Even getting access to a unix host and running it there will be tricky -- Ramblurr himself had to nurse it along with those new utilities. I will take another look at it when I have time, and see if there are any shortcuts, but depending on how Event Horizon goes, it might take a back seat.
Finally, I would say that even though you don't program, you are providing a first class contribution to the PBM world via this site. Please keep it up, your efforts are appreciated!
RE: Where the Winds of PBM meet the Play-By-Mail Mountain - Cortrah - 06-28-2013
I'd like to add to Ixnay's appreciation.
I also firmly believe that the style of play by mail is a good one for the lifestyle of today's gamer and that there is a decent market for it there if folk can create interfaces that compete with the polished but creatively empty "schlock" shops and their "free" mmo's filled with marketing gimmicks.
The world of programming took a huge step backwards in terms of productivity when the web became the platform, but in the past 4 or 5 years web development frameworks (and browsers) have improved to the point where small development shops have a chance of creating decent software again that targets a browser and doesn't cost a million dollars.
It's taken 15 years for writing web software to become as easy as it was for the pbm programmers of the 80's with their flat file databases and c, but it is really starting to get there now.
But there are other kinds of success than economic, too. Cruenti Dei has not only invigorated my gaming lifestyle, but my creative lifestyle as well. I write stories about what's going on I draw illustrations about what's going on. It goes at a very slow pace because it's still all hand moderated, but It's as much a collaborative storytelling game with a bunch of mysteries to solve as it is a strategy game with enemies to conquer.
I feel very positive about the future of this genre.