08-30-2011, 03:56 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-04-2017, 09:06 PM by GrimFinger.)
One of the things that stands out to me, during my recent treks through the pages of back issues of play by mail magazines of old, is that one of the driving forces of the PBM genre was strong intellect. Simply put, there were some very smart cookies that injected life into the genre that was play by mail - on both the design side and on the player side.
Reading a Moderator Bio about Kathleen Seymour and Donald Redick of Fractal Dimensions is what got me to thinking about the degree of intellectual sophistication that went into designing, moderating, and yes, playing PBM games.
While many PBM games never lived up to the hype of those who designed them, or of those who advertised them, even still, many (if not most) of them were probably more complex than their critics - and many of their fans - gave them credit for.
I can't recall how many hours went into designing my PBM game, and it wasn't even a programmed affair. My game wasn't driven so much by strong intellect as it was by strong desire, though.
A lot of games that I have tried online in succeeding years have probably been at least as competently programmed as their PBM predecessors were years before, but they don't often strike me as being particularly sophisticated. My game wasn't really sophisticated, so it is not as though I am predisposed in favor of sophistication, per se.
The play by mail genre went through its Wild West stage, I suppose, as did various electronic mediums, many years later. Through time, mediums have a way of losing their frontier quality, it seems. Normalcy sets in, and complacency along with it.
Play by mail companies used to be well springs of innovation. They would churn out new games, and the world was young. It was that innovation, that sense of all kinds of PBM games everywhere that one looked, no matter which way that one turned, that helped to fire the imaginations of the PBM generation. Maybe PBM companies simply ran into a wall. Had they reached the end of their imaginations? Was the well spring of ideas now run dry?
In the March/April 1994 issue of Paper Mayhem magazine, Issue # 65, in his "Where We're Heading" column, editor David Webber stated that, after compiling Paper Mayhem's demographics, he knew that more and more PBMers were playing fewer and fewer PBM games.
Fast forward to Issue # 87, the November/December 1997 issue of the same magazine, and in the same column, we find David lamenting that he was hearing less and less from PBM companies. Shame on them! If anyone ever fought the good fight, it was David Webber. I never really knew him, but I miss him an awful lot, these days.
Fast forward again to the current era. Several PBM game designers of vintage era PBM games are trying to extend their legacy into a new era of gaming. All of them that are programmers are probably better programmers, now, than they were back then. But, I can't help but to wonder which of them will succeed and which of them will fail. I don't wish failure on any of them, but wishes, alone, won't make any of them succeed, and experience teaches that at least some of their efforts will end in failure.
That's just how the cookie crumbles.
Reading a Moderator Bio about Kathleen Seymour and Donald Redick of Fractal Dimensions is what got me to thinking about the degree of intellectual sophistication that went into designing, moderating, and yes, playing PBM games.
While many PBM games never lived up to the hype of those who designed them, or of those who advertised them, even still, many (if not most) of them were probably more complex than their critics - and many of their fans - gave them credit for.
I can't recall how many hours went into designing my PBM game, and it wasn't even a programmed affair. My game wasn't driven so much by strong intellect as it was by strong desire, though.
A lot of games that I have tried online in succeeding years have probably been at least as competently programmed as their PBM predecessors were years before, but they don't often strike me as being particularly sophisticated. My game wasn't really sophisticated, so it is not as though I am predisposed in favor of sophistication, per se.
The play by mail genre went through its Wild West stage, I suppose, as did various electronic mediums, many years later. Through time, mediums have a way of losing their frontier quality, it seems. Normalcy sets in, and complacency along with it.
Play by mail companies used to be well springs of innovation. They would churn out new games, and the world was young. It was that innovation, that sense of all kinds of PBM games everywhere that one looked, no matter which way that one turned, that helped to fire the imaginations of the PBM generation. Maybe PBM companies simply ran into a wall. Had they reached the end of their imaginations? Was the well spring of ideas now run dry?
In the March/April 1994 issue of Paper Mayhem magazine, Issue # 65, in his "Where We're Heading" column, editor David Webber stated that, after compiling Paper Mayhem's demographics, he knew that more and more PBMers were playing fewer and fewer PBM games.
Fast forward to Issue # 87, the November/December 1997 issue of the same magazine, and in the same column, we find David lamenting that he was hearing less and less from PBM companies. Shame on them! If anyone ever fought the good fight, it was David Webber. I never really knew him, but I miss him an awful lot, these days.
Fast forward again to the current era. Several PBM game designers of vintage era PBM games are trying to extend their legacy into a new era of gaming. All of them that are programmers are probably better programmers, now, than they were back then. But, I can't help but to wonder which of them will succeed and which of them will fail. I don't wish failure on any of them, but wishes, alone, won't make any of them succeed, and experience teaches that at least some of their efforts will end in failure.
That's just how the cookie crumbles.