Episodic Strategy Games or "PBM"?

[BobMcLain]

Rick and I and Steve Tierney (Madhouse) and a couple others had this discussion about rebranding "play by mail" as "episodic strategy games" about ten years ago. It got no traction then, and it has no traction now. For the relatively small number of people interested in play-by-mail games, the sense of being part of a community or a gaming genre that stretches back a ways trumps completely the appeal of an awkwardly worded "modern" alternative. I think Madhouse calls its PBM games "turn based gaming", which is not quite so bad and which has some connection with the much, much larger MMO turn-based strategy game industry. If I'm a newcomer, I can understand "turn-based" games; but "episodic strategy" - what's that, "turn-based"? Also, to the wider gaming community, "episode" means something very different from a turn:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_video_game

Way I look at it, if you design a great game that everyone wants to play, you can call it "shit from shinola based gaming", and people will send you money.