03-11-2011, 09:58 AM
Down through the years established play by mail companies have spent a lot of time and energy reinventing the wheel. The wheel that I am referring to is the graphical user interface, or GUI for short.
In the postal genre of gaming, the original graphical user interface for play by mail games was the player, himself. Each PBM game came stocked with a brain and an imagination. Graphics resolution was a non-issue, for players' imaginations enjoyed open-ended resolution. In their respective minds, entire worlds - even entire universes - took shape and became populated with details. Hardware compatibility issues were non-existent, as players' imaginations could absorb any play by mail game, even if players simultaneously seemed seldom capable of mastering the games, themselves.
Play by mail game moderators have struggled over the years to transition their entertainment products to the digital age. Apparently suffering under the self-imposed mass delusion that graphics were key to a form of entertainment that was traditionally and historically bereft of graphics, they set about the formidable task of "enhancing" their games with graphical capabilities. The ensuring result? Failure, typically.
While it should, perhaps, be binary to PBM companies that play by mail gaming was never graphics-dependent, either to survive or to thrive as a viable medium of gaming entertainment, nevertheless, PBM's Old Guard apparently suffered great difficulty seeing the forest for the trees.
Rather than bringing tried, tested, and proven entertainment to an Internet-empowered potential user base numbering in the millions, PBM's Old Guard opted to take advantage of technology to alter their core entertainment products. The result, as predictable in hindsight as it may be? Mass failure. Mass rejection by the gaming public. A sharp decline in the genre as a whole.
While opinions on such topics may vary widely, I would like to make one observation: The Internet did not kill text as a viable medium of communication.
So, if the vast bulk of play by mail games of old were largely text based games, why do people think that the Internet killed play by mail or somehow or other rendered it obsolete? Even if it did, was it because this medium of entertainment was primarily text based?
Personally, I think that such is exceptionally unlikely. If play by mail gaming has died, all readily available evidence to the contrary not withstanding, then its demise likely has nothing, whatsoever, to do with classic PBM games being exercises in text writ large, pardon the pun.
In the postal genre of gaming, the original graphical user interface for play by mail games was the player, himself. Each PBM game came stocked with a brain and an imagination. Graphics resolution was a non-issue, for players' imaginations enjoyed open-ended resolution. In their respective minds, entire worlds - even entire universes - took shape and became populated with details. Hardware compatibility issues were non-existent, as players' imaginations could absorb any play by mail game, even if players simultaneously seemed seldom capable of mastering the games, themselves.
Play by mail game moderators have struggled over the years to transition their entertainment products to the digital age. Apparently suffering under the self-imposed mass delusion that graphics were key to a form of entertainment that was traditionally and historically bereft of graphics, they set about the formidable task of "enhancing" their games with graphical capabilities. The ensuring result? Failure, typically.
While it should, perhaps, be binary to PBM companies that play by mail gaming was never graphics-dependent, either to survive or to thrive as a viable medium of gaming entertainment, nevertheless, PBM's Old Guard apparently suffered great difficulty seeing the forest for the trees.
Rather than bringing tried, tested, and proven entertainment to an Internet-empowered potential user base numbering in the millions, PBM's Old Guard opted to take advantage of technology to alter their core entertainment products. The result, as predictable in hindsight as it may be? Mass failure. Mass rejection by the gaming public. A sharp decline in the genre as a whole.
While opinions on such topics may vary widely, I would like to make one observation: The Internet did not kill text as a viable medium of communication.
So, if the vast bulk of play by mail games of old were largely text based games, why do people think that the Internet killed play by mail or somehow or other rendered it obsolete? Even if it did, was it because this medium of entertainment was primarily text based?
Personally, I think that such is exceptionally unlikely. If play by mail gaming has died, all readily available evidence to the contrary not withstanding, then its demise likely has nothing, whatsoever, to do with classic PBM games being exercises in text writ large, pardon the pun.