This game and many others like it saved me from a boring school life. While lessons passed by, i was busy dreaming up my next characters, plans for campaigns and even sketching up the blue prints to some home made fantasy game systems. My mum often likes to taunt me about my old habits when around her friends, telling them about the trips and detours she would have to make to take me to Games Workshop to buy strange dice and weird books.

Living in a world dominated by computer games, i can’t emphasize enough the story-telling and communal theatre-making aspects that don’t exist in MMORPGs, even if they are also great to play. Gaming across a table led to gaming via mail (snail mail). Sounds boring, was actually wonderfully rewarding, even with the disjointed distances of time, waiting for your hand-moderated “turn”(example gm reply to one) to be processed. I think the fact that i paid for these “turns” also added to the tension. Playing-by-mail differed from table hosted campaigns like D&D, in that we played in a shared universe of sometimes up to thousands of players, in 1985! In a sense they were the forbearers of contemporary MMORPGs. I used to love turning up as a teenager at conferences and meet up with the people behind the players or parties playing or sometime famous in these shared universes created via paper and stamps. Our forum was a monthly zine which listed rankings and news items. Some of my favourite (hand-moderated) play-by-mail games included: Saturnalia, Crassimoff’s World, and another game, name forgotten although remember letting the GM crash at my place as he was from Sheffield and had to ask my mum for permission for him to couchsurf.

What play-by-mail games teach you indirectly is creative writing, expanding your imagination (by becoming someone else), and how to deal with others. I guess MMORPGs are taking collaboration to another level entirely (as military industrial complex is studying them!), although they don’t have the writing and character development that comes with RPGs around the table or via mail.

I’m toasting you Gary Gygax tonight for inventing the RPG!

[UPDATE] …and many more have been writing about it here and here