PBM Gaming: Expanding the Beachhead

[GrimFinger]

To me, Play by Mail wasn't about waiting 7 - 10 days to get a turn back, it wasn't about having gigantic phone-bills talking with my allies, and while it certainly was about cranking out a newsletter for my alliance, most of what was in it was way out of date by the time it reached its readers (all 12 of them.)

I agree, that play by mail wasn't about high phone bills and waiting a week or more to receive turn results back, afters ending turn orders in.

It was about role-playing - notice how much role-playing you and Ix are doing with a game that really doesn't offer that much support for it. It was about working out strategies to accomplish goals that either I created for myself and with my friends or that the game created for me or us - i.e. it was about winning.

Ixnay is merely an aside, to why I started that [url=

]Lamentations of the Damned[/url] thread, elsewhere on this site. It's actually a feedback thread for the game's moderator, Casey.

[quote='JonO' pid='734' dateline='1301958686']These days, I pay my bills on line, I buy most non foodstuffs/clothing on-line, I read entire books on line, and watch movies on line. I WM two non-gaming community websites and participate in three or four more regularly. Almost all of my personal communication with family and friends is by email. Hell, I file my taxes on line. I cannot imagine a circumstance whereby I would want to play by mail when I don't even pay by mail anymore.

I file our taxes, online. I do very little in the way of shopping, online - or offline, for that matter.

What PBMs that survived the avalanche of internet gaming did so by, at the least, becoming primarily PBeM, and or becoming PBW like BSE-Phoenix. I don't see that becoming less true as the price of mailing continues to soar, the postal service continues to slow down, and the ubiquity of the internet and internet communication becomes greater.

Hyborian War is unlikely to change its stripes, and will likely remain a postal game, due to licensing restrictions, I suspect.

I think that the postal medium, even today, can still be a viable medium for gaming, the current pricing structure considered. To me, what it boils down to is entertainment. There's no postage to send an e-mail or a file attachment. That's hard to be, and impossible for the postal service to beat. But, the original play by mail industry came into existence with technology that is Neanderthal, by today's standards. Certainly, the technology exists for a new era in postal gaming to take root - and to flourish. Technology can revisit the use of the postal medium for entertainment purposes.

25 years ago, I suspect that you would have started a magazine like David Webber or Nicky Palmer did. Instead you started a website and are extremely interested in its search engine rankings, because you know that the Internet is the way people communicate these days.

I subscribed to Paper Mayhem, David Webber's magazine, for a short while, a very long time ago. So, I was around. I had also intended to try and go forward with a PDF format PBM magazine, and perhaps do a limited run of print copies of it using print on demand publishing.

My interest, of late, in the search engine rankings is a narrow one. If i wanted to improve this site's ranking with search engines, then I would simply drop the portal page (the home page of the site), and replace it with an HTML page.

I very much agree that people communicate with the Internet, these days. If I sent people a greeting card through the postal service, today, though, I suspect that many of them would consider it to be special - far more special than if I sent them an e-mail.

If the concept of PBM is to make a comeback - and I sure hope it does - it will be because new designers utilize today's technology to offer gamers what appealed to gamers about PBM 25 years ago. What those games will look like may be very different. How players interact with the game and the other gamers will be different in method, but similar in content. But the fun and excitement will be pretty much what it used to be. . . I hope.

From my perspective, it isn't just the Internet versus the postal service. Considerations such as desktop publishing empowers individuals to utilize paper as a medium far more effectively than in the past. The bad economy of recent years considered, society still spends tons of money on entertainment, each year. The key, I think, is that, especially if one uses the postal medium to generate entertainment in gaming form, then one would be well served to make it special. Utilizing that approach, I think that a new era in postal gaming could dawn. Technology, after all, is very good at empowering.

I have a printer. I use it on almost a daily basis. The printer empowers me to make paper, as a medium, more convenient and useful to me. It could easily be utilized for gaming purposes, as well. Even in an e-mail game like Far Horizons: The Awakening, I still find myself using my relatively meager home office capabilities to paper-ize that e-mail game.