PBM Gaming: Expanding the Beachhead

[GrimFinger]

Heh, I'm gone for a day and I miss this lively discussion.

I hope that you did not forget to bring back souvenirs for all of us.

My one comment at this point is in regards to the relevance of postal mailboxes. I don't think anyone here is saying the postal mailbox is irrelevant, after all we all have them.

Exactly - the postal mailbox isn't irrelevant. It is relevant for many things, including gaming. The only commercial PBM game that I play at the moment uses postal delivery, in fact.

However, JonO, Sean, and I assert that the postal mailbox as a delivery system for gaming entertainment is irrelevant, and Grim disagrees. Though I suspect we've different goals. Let's stick to discussing gaming

We are discussing gaming.

RSI, as a PBM game company, seems to have survived the transition to the Internet era intact. Ironically enough, it never abandoned the postal service as a primary method of delivering turn results to players. The online player bases for its game seem to rival those of other PBM companies still around, yet who opted for a different approach.

If postal delivery still works for RSI, then it stands to reason, at least to me, that it could still work for other play by mail companies, too. PBM was never simply about the commercial sector of the industry. Granted, the commercial sector garnered most of the coverage in PBM magazines, but having run my own PBM game via the postal service during that time, and being one who was well aware of the existence of at least some PBM magazines, such as Paper Mayhem and the American version of Flagship, yet having opted to not advertise my game in those venues, I have a hard time believing that I was the only one doing it.

In this new era of Internet omnipresence, it is certainly valid to question the wisdom in paying for postage and envelopes and paper, simply in order to get turn results for a game to its end recipient - the gamer.

However, with the advent of the Internet, the established postal service did not simply evaporate. It still exists. All of those postal mailboxes still exist, too. As such, they do constitute an opportunity for those willing and able to exploit them, as a medium for gaming.

Some bills that I used to pay electronically, have long since done away with it. Now, that doesn't mean that I think that the online environment is becoming any the less relevant. Far from it. However, receiving an actual set of turn results in the postal mailbox is still an event.

I don't seek to turn a vice into a virtue. Yes, with postal delivery, players have no real choice, but to wait. They don't wait, simply to enhance the anticipation factor.

Anticipation naturally accompanies the wait. It is not the slave, thereof. Foregoing the wait, electronically, also results in the anticipation factor being less. There's a trade-off there. I don't think it's because anyone designed it that way. Rather, I think that it's simply that way. I think that it's part of the nature of the beast, that each medium of gaming has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, relative to one another.