PBM News Blurb - November 25th, 2011

[GrimFinger]

Project Libertine

Hatch, over at the Project Libertine Development Blog, returned in September from four months worth of work-related travel, and has apparently resumed work on Project Libertine, an upcoming 4X Space Exploration browser game.

Since that September 7th, 2011 blog entry, however, Hatch has not posted since.

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PlayByMail.Net

PlayByMail.Net site user Matrim has posted a review for KJC Games' Phoenix game, and it is a review worth checking out, if you haven't read it, yet.

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Star Throne

While sifting through the cosmic dust of the Play By Mail genre's remains, I happened across a little background history for an old PBM game originally called Power, "The Star Throne Beckons" - a PBM game created back in 1985, and designed by Jim Dutton for Entertainment Concepts, Inc..

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KJC Games

Dropping by the KJC Games' forum, posting activity in the forum there has picked up a slight bit, in recent months, a positive change of pace for a forum site that previously seemed to be a near death experience.

Unfortunately, it still isn't possible to register a new forum account there, which does not bode well for KJC Games' non-Phoenix game offerings. This conscious choice by KJC Games to preclude new forum registrations virtually assures, I think, that the chance of any of the company's non-Phoenix games enjoying a resurrection is nil.

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Lone Warrior Blog

A fellow named Kishember over on the Lone Warrior Blog site apparently recommended the PlayByMail.Net website as a good general Play-by-mail/email website, back in June of this year. It's good to see that our site here is proving to be of value to individuals like Kishember.

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Madhouse UK

The DungeonWorld discussion group on Yahoo! is still going strong, for any who are interested in what some of Steve Tierney's gaming minions are up to, these days.

Madhouse's new website is still under construction, for the curious Internet traveler.

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Far Horizons

Those who continue to wonder whatever became of Far Horizons' last game moderator, Casey, you can track the progress of his nomadic lifestyle and world travels over at his Elusive Truth website, a chronicle of his travel adventures.

The link to his defunct Far Horizons website is now a dead link, it appears. How unfortunate it is for the PBM community to lose this Far Horizons resource.

[Jim_Landes]

I played and analyzed Power back in the day.. a very interesting game design that was in many ways far ahead of it's time. It was not well fitted to it's business model and faded into the woodwork after a few years.

Kindest regards,

Jim

[GrimFinger]

So, what was the game, Power, like, Jim, and why do you think that it was not well fitted to its business model?

[Jim_Landes]

So, what was the game, Power, like, Jim, and why do you think that it was not well fitted to its business model?

From memory 25 years in the past:

Power was a PBM game by ECI. ECI specialized in interactive storytelling and was primarily hand moderating their games.

Power was a departure from their interactive-story offerings as it was a political simulation set in the far future. Players took the role of the various “Elite” in this futuristic society and gained control and influence over various game pieces that represented power blocks in this simulation.

If this sounds a bit esoteric, it was. As I recall there were industrialists, reporters, military units, population segments, assassins, political leaders, religious leaders, military leaders, police forces, secret societies, etc. There were hundreds of these “units” and as a player we expended resources to gain control of these game pieces to compete for effective control of the game.

It was a high context game that failed to deliver the vision of the context that the game was set against. I consider the concept of what the designer was trying to accomplish a breakthrough, even though there were significant design and story-telling missteps.

From a business model perspective, in PBM you have to tie the cost of processing the turn to the fees you receive from the player. The method of how you process turns has to be sustainable and highly repeatable to keep quality high and more importantly to operate inside a some margin of profit.

The “story” results that were being generated for game actions, likely by hand, took this offering well outside the acceptable margins of profitability.

Today we would procedurally generate the responses to this sort of game, and could easily become a profitable venture.

Kindest regards,

Jim

[Hatch]

I've just been lazy. I have no real excuse really other than I've been doing different fun stuff. Heh.

Project Libertine

Hatch, over at the Project Libertine Development Blog, returned in September from four months worth of work-related travel, and has apparently resumed work on Project Libertine, an upcoming 4X Space Exploration browser game.

Since that September 7th, 2011 blog entry, however, Hatch has not posted since.

[Kelvin Woodfist]

Power + , The Star Throne Beckons, is the only PBM game I've ever played. It was thoroughly enjoyable to me, and I've looked for it a few times online, and just found out through you that it exists now only as a memory. My question to you, since you've played it, is have you ever come across a PBM or PBeM game similar to it? I would love to find something that was even close to it. Thanks.