Barriers and Obstacles: Into the Breach of a New Era in Play-By-Mail Gaming

[GrimFinger]

I never thought of myself as being part of a golden age before but I am pretty sure you'll agree that the success of BSE or Tribes of Crane or Supernova or Illuminati-PBM was not because of their bug-plagued games. Most moderators (professional or hobbyist) labored hard and long to eliminate second rate code and shoddy workmanship. Those that didn't, died and in their short existence did more harm to the genre than good.

Well, having never played in BES (Beyond the Stellar Empire), Tribes of Crane, Supernova, or Illuminati-PBM, I am at a disadvantage in my ability to speak about those games, specifically - but, I'll try, anyway.

Or, if I may, I'll use two PBM games that I never played in, Tribes of Crane and StarMaster.

From what I have been able to deduce, thus far, these two games were exceedingly popular, during their respective apex moments in the play by mail gaming sun.

I would and I do agree that the success of these behemoths of the PBM landscape all those many years ago was not due to the fact that they may have been bug-plagued, to use your phraseology of choice.

I think that what made them as popular as they proved to be was that they made effective use of the postal medium to entertain their players. Their code and even their structure considered (I don't know the ratio of automated code and human moderator input of each game in question), what these games apparently delivered, at least for a time, was entertainment on an unprecedented level, on the PBM scale of things.

You probably had a situation where the game moderators were energetically active in the entertainment equations of these two games. People loves the special actions of StarMaster, or so I have heard. Players loved the epic feel of these games. Whether the games were truly epic in proportion and size or not, they felt epic.

There seems to have been a lot of role playing involved, on the player side of these games. Players immersed themselves, a whole bunch of them, in fact, and the entertainment value that these games delivered to their respective player communities was greater than the sum of their individual parts. Personally, and I could be wrong, of course, I don't think that it was the code that should receive credit, but rather, the heavy degree of human involvement and human interaction.

From your mouth to God's ear! (Even though I think you don't mean play-by-web )

Actually, at the time that I wrote that article, last year, I don't think that I was even thinking of play-by-web, when I wrote it.

I'm not an enemy of play-by-web games, at all. Of the ones that I have tried, to date, they have just left me feeling flat - and bored. I just got tired of trying boring web game after boring web game.