Hello again,
Glad to see that my post got through.
Yes, I do have a topic, on which I would like to get people's advise. (I hope this is the right place for such a post, in case not please instruct me where to post, thanks)
It's about the present popularity of pbems. Or rather, let me re-phrase it, decreasing popularity, imo. What I noticed these days, compared to a couple of years ago, is a declining trend in the overall activity of pbeming. This is just my feeling, feel free to disagree. (do you?) For instance there used to be pbem.com website with lots of post by both players and GMs, looking for games or players. Now the site seems gone. I remember my first pbem, which I GMed back in something like 1997 or 98 got me 10 immediate replies instantly only after I placed an ad. After some time I got involved in Amber drpg gaming, which became my favourite genre and there was a mailing list at amber-at-logrus.org, which was breaking in its seams with tons of posts daily. Even back in 2003 and 2004, as far as I can remember, the level of activity was alright.
These days I find things to be contrary. I found a lot of dead links, a lot of dead games. And those which are operational seem to be sort of hidden in the shadows with a close groups of friends, who know each other for some time and role-play, mostly out of an old habit. Is it that the attention of on-line gaming shifted to some faster and graphically richer games? (example of such games would be: EverQuest2, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Diablo2)
Btw, it's a strange feeling browsing through some dead game forums, which used to be booming with prosperity as I remember them, only to find 1- or 2-year-old posts about closing the game due to the lack of activity. I felt like a ghost reading these old posts, only distant howling in a distance, other than that nothing but silver silence around.
A point, which I want to make is that many of the 3d games, which you can play online do not have a touch of literature, sometimes don't even have a storyline. All you do is swing a blade and kill whatever you encounter. Well, this is also fine. And my intension is not to condemn these games - I enjoy playing some of them. It's to condemn the trend. My position is that nothing can replace the good-old-pbems. What is (was?) great about them, imo, was that with minimum necessary rules, you could let your imagination go wild in your favourite genre, step into your character's shoes and contribute in building the world around you. This opened vast field of possibilities and let you discover new things. You could fight, fence, plot, conjure, kill (horror) etc. etc. This is boosting imagination, improving your writing skills, working on the interactions with the others, heck even learning things. I cannot say you can do all that with the graphically perfect online action games.
So let me pose a question: what happened to the good-old-rpg'ing? Or maybe my picture is totally wrong?
Regards,
Jericho
Roger Burton West wrote:
On Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 04:16:34PM -0600, Jericho Barimen wrote:
> Hope there is much activity here and hope to have some good discussion.
The level of activity is quite variable. If you have a gaming topic you
want to talk about, now is an ideal time to post it. :-)
--
Roger, gaming grognard
Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/
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