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

[JonO]

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.

That was your choice of words, not mine. I never played in a game that was noticeably buggy - one of the advantages to paying for playing, I suppose.

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.

The size and scope of those games was almost entirely due to the fact that they ran on computers. There is no way that hand-moderation can deal with the complexities of hundreds or thousands of sectors and hundreds of players. The computers freed the GMs from the scut work and allowed them the time to handle special actions.

Illuminati-PBM (GAMA's Best PBM Game of 1988), by the way, was/is entirely computer moderated. As was/is Star Web. It might be argued that that those games are still around because they didn't depend on clever GM-ing.

Rick Loomis's take on this:
"All of Flying Buffalo's games are completely computer-run for accuracy (computers generally do not make mistakes, although admittedly the operators sometimes do), speed (we have over a hundred games running and hundreds of customers and can handle as many as care to sign up), and fairness (you don't have a human referee looking at your turn and deciding what happens - the computer treats everyone exactly equal.)"

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.

Me, too. in any version of gaming. Remind me to tell you some time about a couple of the stinkers I paid $39.95 to own on CD. One advantage of tutorials we didn't think about is, if they are available before signing up, it's possible to spot a boring game without playing it.