Play-by-mail games

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1987 by Kevin Kelly

THESE were my instructions: "You are a religious fanatic.

Your purpose is to convert the entire galaxy to your particular point of view Each of your converts has a 10-percent chance of converting the whole of that planet. Other players may win back your converts by unloading consumer goods on them." There were 200 other characters battling for the some worlds I was, and I had to have my next move in the mail, postmarked by tomorrow.

Play-by-mail games are widespread, but hidden by the privacy of first class envelopes. The first play-bymail games were probably unfinished games of Chess or Go extended by messages between two players. Then os other strategy games come along, ones which demanded careful moves that could be easily relayed on paper, it was natural to try them by post. By the seventies, entire stores were devoted to room-size strategy boord games, a few of which might be ployed by mail. The stores were also incubators for the peculiar teenage phenomenon of role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons.

A young generation of kids obsessed with role-ploying games grew up and found a place for multiplayer, multilevel games in computeriand. The elaborate complexity of spells, weaponry, rules, and plot was perfectly suited to the arcane logic and aioof fairness of the computer Early computer adventure games carried the vocabulary of role-playing games onto the screen, awarding players for finding a way through Me maze, but not encouraging creative pretending.

Games-by-mail today combine the logical challenge of the computer with the intrigue of role playing. They are amazingly detailed scenarios played out by an army of long-distant gamers submitting their turns to o central game-moster compute, r to be weighed and calculated, then tabulated into a printout sent by retum mail. It's a little bit of bureaucratic warfare. By the middle of the game I have to keep in mind that before I leave a planet I must have on board at least 35 crew members of rank 7 or higher, they have to be paid in Celestran Credit (Form CC), and they con only be hired at a designated colonial base, as per starfleet manunal. Rick Loomis, who invented this genre of game-by-mail in 1970 and now runs Flying Buffalo, the most reliable play-by-mail commercial service, describes the general procedure:

"The concept is simple: you send written instructions for eoch tum to the game company. The company processes and plots out the results. It reports back your new position, and acts as moderator and referee. "Your role in the game will vary according to the game setting. Thus, you might be a feudal baron, a chieftain of a nomodic tribe, or - in Me case of illuminati - the wise and crafty leader of a great conspiracy to take over the world.

"For $2 or so, you get a rulebook, background materials, and instructions for filling out your tum sheets. At this point, games begin to differ in what they demand of you. There are games where you have to remember lots of codes to enter on your turnsheet, and games where you write out long essays detailing what you want your character to do.

After processing your turn, the game company will send you between onehalf ond ten pages of information about your tum. Most likely it wig come back as a computer printout that will tell you what happened, either in code, in English, or something in between. Then you fill out another turnsheet based on these results, ond send it back to the game company for another round. The usual cycle is every two weeks, or every month if you live overseas. (You also con request slow or fast modes of the games.)The company charges about $2 for each turn. Many have a credit accounting system, and debit you each play. You con also buy a lifetime "play" for about $500, which allows you to keep scheming forever.

"Games vary a great deal in terms of the amount of inter-player communication. Players in "no-diplomacy" (or "anonymous") games compete, but are not allowed to communicate or make deals with each other outside the game. At the other extreme, the biggest "full-diplomacy" games have elaborate alliances, player-run organizations, and often their own newsletters. Many play-by-mail alliances span continents, and occasionally generations, and last for years. The games have their own histories as well. StarWeb, one of the most successful play-by-mail games, has completed over a thousand cycles of its interstellar contest.

"There are about 10,000 players involved in games at the moment. Although there has been a big push for the last five years urging people to send their tums via computer networks like CompuServe or MCI Mail, only about TO percent do so. The computers which run the games are invisible, and don't interest players. Play-by-mail gamers like mail. They can forward a message to other players with their move swapping addresses. Pretty soon they hove a mailbox full of personal, passionate mail.

"One of the fascinating things about play-by-mail games is that the backgrounds of the players are so diverse. Your allies may include a student, a county sheriff a physicist, and a Shakespearean actor, but you won't often know, or care.