PBM Gaming: Expanding the Beachhead

[JonO]

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

According to CNET, in the last ten years access to a broadband connection at home has grown from 3% of internet users in 2000 to 66% in 2010. Once anyone gets broadband, their use of the internet as a primary means of communication becomes second nature.

I think that the postal medium, even today, can still be a viable medium for gaming, the current pricing structure considered.

And there is still a place for buggy-whip holders on horse-drawn buggies, but that is not the primary means of family transportation any longer.

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.

The impression that one gets from your posts is that search engine ranking are important to you as a measure of how likely you are to attract more readers.

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.

There is nothing that can be done in a turn that is mailed out that cannot be done faster and more economically on the internet. The reverse, of course, is not true.

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.

OK, you prefer to print out your turns. And, at least in theory you could scan your by-mail turns into your computer. Both concepts use modern technology to do something that was almost impossible to do at home in 1980.

But, assuming the point of filing a turn is to get a re-turn (as opposed to the point being to wait a couple of weeks), the rewards of the email game will be much higher.