Games PBeM... what happened?

So I feel like PBeM games have started to dry up lately. Anyone else feeling that way? It used to be a bustling community with tons of players, and great writers, but now it feels like it's hard to scrape a crew together to get plots going.

Anyone else having that issue? Or am I doing something wrong lol

Aaron

 

Perhaps email has largely become something you read on your phone (from anywhere), and people don't like to type lengthy things like RP posts on their phones.

 

Off hand I have a really hard time judging play by email because most of the writing goes on in private. So it's hard to say just how active it really is. But on most directories and other sites I'm on, it seems pretty rare for people to do play via email. So maybe people are moving away from play by email to forums or blogs?

 

Online roleplayers moved from email and chatrooms to forums around....2001. Play-by-email format is an ancient relic of the 90s. It will never go away, but it will never be as popular again. Nowadays its the forum RPs that are feeling "old."

 

I've felt that way for some time now. I liked the group format, where any posts would go to email and players could either answer via email posts to the group or from the group interface, think the old yahoo groups or the newer groups.io, which is a lot like the old yahoo. That format seems to have really dried up for a good many fandoms or genres. I've not been able to successfully navigate a forum role-play as of yet or get newer games started. Playing strictly by email limits a game to only two writers, thus eliminating any possible dynamic of multiple writers playing off each other. Are the good old days really gone? Sometimes, it seems like it and that's a real shame.

 

Exchanging emails is cool as a side activity to a LARP. But if everything happens there... I think forums are better if you like lenghty posts, and chats are better for fast-paced games.

 

I really think email and forum games coexisted pretty well for awhile, but then over the last decade Nova and blog based games have pushed email into the periphery. Which is sad, really, because that used to be my preferred format.

 

I think part of the reason pbem has tapered off so much is that a lot of people recognize the usefulness of a content management system for organizing meta data, for giving new and potential players easy access to read old activity and get a feel for the game. But when people first started online rp, the access to better things was costly: money to pay someone to do it, or skill to make it yourself. These days, you can easily get a freely hosted forum or word press, there are not a small number of free Nova hosts, and monthly costs to self host a low traffic site aren't insurmountable anymore.

When I first got involved in star trek simming, my group was using yahoo groups (or whatever it was before yahoo, I don't remember), and it was okay... But I wasn't impressed. There wasn't an easy way to find a crew mate's profile unless the command team maintained a supplemental website, reading the archives wasn't the greatest, and writing a joint log was either a crazy disjointed series of small emails back and forth, or it was a pain to do.

While some people miss the "simplicity" of pbem, a lot of us enjoy the fringe benefits from whichever cms we chose, and that's why pbem has become so much less common.

 

I remember the days of PMeMs with nothing but fondness. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm eager to bring them back. I think @Death Kitten is entirely right and people (especially the ones running the games these days) have discovered just how useful content management systems are. Thank goodness for places like On Going Worlds and systems like Nova for allowing us to progress the way that PBeMs exist these days.

Having said that, the one PBeM that I'm involved in still uses yahoo groups and just ticks over quietly. It's far from being the most active of groups in the world but I do look forward to those occasional emails that drop in once or twice a month.

Personally, once I'd made the switch to forum based games I didn't look back. The transition wasn't easy! But once I'd grown accustomed to the way that things were done on forums and the versatility that they provided, I wasn't prepared to take that step back to just PBeMs. I still write 'joint posts' in shared google docs or places like meetingwords with several of my players. I suppose in that way I manage to get the best of both worlds. I love collaborative writing and I don't think PBP games provide it in quite the same way.

So, I suppose what I'm saying Aaron, is that although PBeMs were fabulous they were very much a product of their times. I think there will always be a niche community for them but it's only going to grow increasingly rarer for new ones to pop up. There are simply too many other more efficient means of running games out there these days. I'll remember them fondly. I just can't say I'm sad to see bigger, better ways of managing groups from cropping up.

 

I know what you mean. I suspect chatroom and forum-based games are probably more popular these days. I certainly noticed a decline after PBEM.com closed back in 2005. I think part of the problem is that very few of the popular PBEM-era websites are still around. There are only two left, Greg Lindahl's List and PBEM2.com, and I don't think either of them are very active these days.

 

Right now it's forums that are going the way of the dodo as migrations to tumblr/discord/etc. have taken their toll over the years with not enough replacements to bring back the numbers that were lost to those other, quicker and less investment required mediums.

Times change and the newer roleplayers move on to what's hot, so it's just the older and more stubborn people who remain after a while.

 

Yeah I'm def in the that stubborn and older catagory

 

PBEM until the day I die. lol. My current game is played through groups.io, which is like a better version of the old yahoo groups. I love the chronology, the archiving, the organization of the io site. The emailing posts feature is second to all of that other stuff. (I'm also older and stubborn, lol)