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Digital Games Industries:
Developments, Impact and Direction

A Postal Strike: Playing by Mail in the Online World

Ian Miles
CRIC, University of Manchester, UK

The contemporary gaming world is far richer than most of the virtual worlds that computer games present us with. In this world, the first person point of view comes from people of all shapes and sizes. The hopeful monsters one encounters range from high-tech juggernauts, backed by all the power that Hollywood and Tokyo can muster (e.g. a PlayStation 2 release based on the latest blockbuster), through armies of Internet users locked together in exploring a virtual environment and the personae that they can assume in it (e.g. multi-user "dungeons"), to puppeteers at work with legion of modernised toy soldiers (e.g. the spawn of Games Workshop), and traditionalists hunched over board games (which continue to proliferate, and hybridise with their electronic descendents - e.g. the Caitan series). There are LRPers, live role players, sometimes attending events that stretch into weeks, where they transform real-life locations into arenas for their historical or fantastic struggles. And then there are the PBMs,

PBM - Play by Mail! How quaint! Yet a thriving PBM community exists, even though PBM is growing in prominence within it. It even has its own magazines - Flagship is the UK example, and one of the present authors should declare that she has a close association with this, as well as with a couple of popular UK PBM games. This association gives us particular opportunity for insight into the field, without, it is hopes, undermining our ability to take a detached view of the field. We will avoid Play by Mail chauvinism.

This paper explores the nature of the PBM community and its (largely cottage) industry. How does it relate to other parts of the gaming ecology, and to other worlds that it impinges on (e.g. the literary and movie genres of science fiction, science fantasy, heroic fantasy, and the like)? How does it persist in a world of high-tech gaming - if this is the right question - and how does it make use itself of technology and technological innovation in forwarding its own crafts? What are the prospects for these games and their suppliers, and what can this tell us about the persistence and even renaissance of non-corporate forms of gaming activity, of human-mediated gaming environments, and of distinctive narrative styles in a time of rapid technological advance and globalised media markets?

The methods used are primarily a mixture of the time-honoured technique of personal anecdote (whether this is regarded as advanced ethnography or as the result of one author's interviewing of the other is largely a matter of taste) and secondary analysis of archival material (including sources such as the Thirteenth Telepath as well as Flagship.)

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Digital Games Industries: Developments, Impact and Direction

A Postal Strike: Playing by Mail in the Online World

Digital Games Industries:
Developments, Impact and Direction