Computer Moderation: The Bane of the Play By Mail Industry

[Victory]

But, automation also comes at a price. Automation is not an all-positive approach to running PBM games.

Just gonna single out that quote before heading to bed. I don't think anyone would disagree with that assessment, however, as we have seen stated, pure hand moderation (the opposite of automation) is not an all-positive approach either when you're running a non-trivially sized game.

I think the main issue comes down to money. Today, people won't pay like they used to. Automation brings efficiency which reduces the GM's time investment, which allows more people to play at the cost of 'the magic'. It is a tradeoff or a spectrum, not a binary choice.

I agree. Even back in the day when SuperNova was cranking out turns (and I was very good at processing turns with some flavor at a good rate per hour) the owners of the company were working 60 hour weeks (ten hour days for six days each week) and we still weren't rolling in money. We couldn't charge more for a turn since we were already one of the pricier games around, but we also couldn't stop spinning the wheels since all our time was spent cranking out turns to pay the rent/computers/paper/postage/taxes/advertising/etc.

You work ten hour days six days a week for years and the creative spark is tough to keep. Keeping track of what hundreds of players did on their last turn gets tougher and tougher.

We turned to a modified system where special actions were no longer hand moderated, but each unique find on a planet had options A, B, C, D to choose from. Those then were recorded and had a tree of options that continued on for the player to explore (I believe that is still the SN:ROTE system).

Going away from the hand moderated special action replies cost us some players, but gained us back enough time to work on another game. Without that change we would never have enough hours in the day to create something new and original and would be stuck just maintaining an old game that didn't ever change much.

Hiring <good> new GMs didn't help since paying them was pretty much a break even proposition and our company just churned more money and our games were larger with more players, but none of the owners were making any more money. Since we couldn't skim enough margin off these additional GMs and still pay them a reasonable salary they could live on the owners were still stuck on the treadmill of spending all our time talking on the phone, picking up and sorting mail, etc since the overhead of those things increased as the player base got higher and higher.

Without automation none of us would get off the hamster wheel of working sixty hours per week to make less money than we could make in a "normal" job doing 40 hours a week. Once one of the owners wanted a family, got married and had a kid his viewpoint changed dramatically which had an equally dramatic impact on the future of the company once his time commitment necessarily had to change.

Hand moderated PBM can only work for small games and probably only for a hobby style GM. And those are dangerous once that hobby becomes slightly less popular than some other hobby that person finds and the game ends with a fizzle.

Automation is about the only way in today's entertainment climate that a company can make a livable wage for someone doing this full time IMHO. It isn't the best option, but it is probably the only option.