Remember play-by-mail games? I sure don’t – I’m an elder zoomer, and play by mail last flourished in the youth of Gen X. Should you share my condition, this excellent history from Aaron A. Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games will provide you the information and emotional attachment prerequisite to the rest of this post:
Allow me to get the plot twist out of the way forthwith: Play-by-mail games still exist. …Barely. Most games on Wikipedia’s “list of active play-by-mail games” are either play-by-e-mail games (which isn’t quite the same thing, is it), or not actually active at all. But! Some have been running for forty, fifty – even sixty years!
And therein lies a bittersweet reality.
What is play by mail today?
The people playing play-by-mail games a quarter-century into the 21st are the same people who were there back in the day – and they know what they want. They want what play-by-mail games were. What they were (and remain), as it turns out, was informed by what the medium uniquely afforded at the time:
-
Postal communication allows a large number of players to connect. That means massively-multiplayer games across the country (or even world)!
-
You don’t have a supercomputer at home. The gamemaster does. More advanced games!
-
In some cases (especially later, with play-by-e-mail games), the slow pace of the game was utilized to allow players time to communicate, scheme, and plot in private communications.
This set of affordances[1] naturally coalesced into one overarching genre: simulation. Nearly all play-by-mail games are simulative – most are grand strategy war games, a handful simulate a hockey league or climbing the ladder of a crime syndicate, and then there’s the role-playing games, which typically focus more on battle simulation than narrative (think Wizardry, not Dragon Quest). With the medium’s stagnant playerbase, this remains the case today – the people drawn to play-by-mail games are interested in war simulation, and if you want to have players join a play-by-mail game you’re set to run (let alone make dosh off the whole shindig), options hardly abound. This state of affairs, however, leaves me with a question…
Has the play-by-mail medium truly been explored?
…Rhetorical question. I don’t think it has.
What could play by mail be?
Most of what lent play by mail its uniqueness in the latter half of the 20th century has been supplanted by modern technology: The internet gives us remote and massive multiplayer capabilities, and you do have a supercomputer. In your pocket, even. The medium of mail has entirely different draws today:
-
The paper medium makes writing and drawing a natural part of a game.
- Player-written content could be collected and distributed to the other players!
- Should a player be artistically inclined, pieces of player-drawn art could be integrated into the game itself.
-
Given the presence of a gamemaster (along with the slow pace), the medium lends itself particularly well to hand-moderation – a human, creative touch in how the game is run and what it contains. In particular, one could mix computer-simulated gameplay with manual elements in a way rarely seen in the digital realm.
-
The “server-side” communication being on paper suggests some opportunities. Stylistically – does it look like a page from a newspaper? An advertisement brochure? – but also mechanically. Are on-paper puzzles a part of it – how about crosswords?
-
Envelopes allow stuffing other physical artifacts in. Little trinkets? Newspaper clippings? Bar codes?
-
The slow pace remains, and with the internet, meta-communication among players (in, say, a chatroom) is a no-ier brainer than ever.
-
A play-by-mail “campaign” can naturally be limited in time – you play for, say, a year. What about real-time elements? Is the game affected by the seasons? Do real-life events play into it somehow?
-
The postal medium can be used diegetically – what if you receive a letter from an in-game character?
We stand on the shoulders of giants. It’s not only the technology that has progressed through the years – but the art of game design. With all indie games have accomplished and experimented with by now, what new, unique experiences could only be created using the postal service? It feels, perhaps to you as it does to me, as though pause was pressed on the medium while it was still in its infancy. And… time is running out, isn’t it?
Going on a decade ago now, brilliant experimental indie game developer and overall stand-up guy Droqen (Starseed Pilgrim, 31 Unmarked Games…) briefly ran a tiny online micro-forum where he discussed Sealed with a Kiss, a would-be play-by-mail game he was idly designing.[2] I was captivated – his ideas sure hadn’t been seen in play-by-mail games before. The game was never realized, though, and the crux is: One day in the not-too-distant future, it never can be. At the time, the postage for a domestic letter in Sweden (where I dwell) was 7 SEK.[3] Today, it’s 22 SEK [4] – more than a 3× increase; hardly in line with inflation. Postal services are being rapidly dismantled in the digital age,[5] and someday, running a play-by-mail game will be entirely nonviable.
I think it’s possible to do something new with the medium in its twilight years. Entice a small community of nerds, and run something homemade for 10–20 people for a year or so. Document the process. Post the rules and “server-side” materials online so that someone else could run it should they want to. Does this sound dreamy to anyone else?
What would you want to see in a modern play-by-mail game?
An addendum…
If you want to play something interesting by mail today, there’s a new medium on the scene: play-by-letter roleplaying games. These are similar to tabletop RPGs, but decidedly narratively focused, and you play them with your friends (typically only two players at once) by sending letters to each other in character. If I may suggest one, Pray by Letter is a game that was translated from Japanese last year, and I’ve been having a magical time with it with a literarily inclined friend. It’s not quite a “play-by-mail game”… but you do play it by mail. Give it a try!
Along with the history of the medium – much like role-playing games, play by mail has its roots in wargaming. ↩︎
The micro-forum for it is still viewable today. ↩︎
Then €0.76; £0.61; 0.87 USD. ↩︎
€1.92; £1.59; 2 USD, at the time of writing. ↩︎
Though thankfully, most aren’t being dismantled at quite the pace of Sweden’s. Chances are, you can still send letters for cheap! ↩︎