PBM News Blurb - November 25th, 2011

[Jim_Landes]

So, what was the game, Power, like, Jim, and why do you think that it was not well fitted to its business model?

From memory 25 years in the past:

Power was a PBM game by ECI. ECI specialized in interactive storytelling and was primarily hand moderating their games.

Power was a departure from their interactive-story offerings as it was a political simulation set in the far future. Players took the role of the various “Elite” in this futuristic society and gained control and influence over various game pieces that represented power blocks in this simulation.

If this sounds a bit esoteric, it was. As I recall there were industrialists, reporters, military units, population segments, assassins, political leaders, religious leaders, military leaders, police forces, secret societies, etc. There were hundreds of these “units” and as a player we expended resources to gain control of these game pieces to compete for effective control of the game.

It was a high context game that failed to deliver the vision of the context that the game was set against. I consider the concept of what the designer was trying to accomplish a breakthrough, even though there were significant design and story-telling missteps.

From a business model perspective, in PBM you have to tie the cost of processing the turn to the fees you receive from the player. The method of how you process turns has to be sustainable and highly repeatable to keep quality high and more importantly to operate inside a some margin of profit.

The “story” results that were being generated for game actions, likely by hand, took this offering well outside the acceptable margins of profitability.

Today we would procedurally generate the responses to this sort of game, and could easily become a profitable venture.

Kindest regards,

Jim