In the beginning, games were played by paper
post, and cost money, and were slow, and mostly awful.
Years passed, the weak perished, and the survivors
became really rather good.
Computers arrived, and solitary video games displaced
much of what had been achieved.
The internet arose, and new multi-player games appeared,
but the line of descent from the postal hobby was broken,
and the cycle
began again, and was mostly awful.
Then it was now, and we have games that use the
advantages of the net (free, many players, fast, reliable)
but draw on
the design heritage of the ancient past.
These games are simple because so much thought and experience
has gone into what to leave out.
Face to face, there are never enough players and games don't last
very long.
Real-time net games are OK for adrenaline, but no good for the other
99% of gaming.
Play by paper mail, and play by email or by web, is how rich, deep, multi-player
games are meant to be played.
There's time to talk to the other players, whether co-operating with
allies or taunting enemies.
There's depth for plans to span months of real-time
as events build to a satisfying climax, or crash to disaster.
There's the
anticipation of waiting for the results of a critical battle to arrive,
or to hear the fate of your red-shirted crew as they beam down into danger.
There's enough reward to balance however much effort as you want to put
into it.
This is an open-ended space-opera, meaning there's just one
game which has been running for 1600 turns (3 per week) so far and is not
expected to end. Various techniques keep it viable for new players while
allowing long-term growth in power and options, so deathstars with years
of experience rub shoulders with new explorers - usually without being
able to blow them up.
While some players go it alone, most work in large or
small groups of allies, and some alliances have produced more processing
code and web pages for the game than we have. There's room for the pirate
as well as the explorer, trader and empire builder.
Join via the home
page, but save yourself and everyone else time by reading the rules
first.
These are closed time-travel games, meaning each game runs for about a
month and ends with a winner. Opportunities to change history are continuously
"auctioned" so players benefit from frequent web access. The weakest player
is eliminated each day, and with almost constant conflict between all
players there is little need for diplomacy.
There is an informal game for casual experiments, and a more serious
one which limits various forms of cheating for players who've decided they
definitely like it. In either case a quick look at the rules
is useful.
Currently, there are no active TATA games. However, if there's enough interest to restart them, who knows...
Extras
The w++ games are discussed on their design list, TBG_Design, accessible
via the Yahoo web site. For
a more informal approach, try the OpenForum
discussion group, or the now infrequently used Alioth
Orbital Oasis newsgroup. w++ account holders can also publish their own
web pages,
usually relating to To Boldly Go, on the web server.
Other PBM/PBEM
For a wider look at the postal and internet gaming hobby,
look at the PBM Homepage
and the many links to related sites. For an example of another web
based game (derived from BBS culture rather than postal gaming like ours),
try Earth 2025. For an SF email
game at the other end of the complexity scale,
try VGA Planets 4.
For the ancient postal Diplomacy hobby that led to this one,
see The Vault, with its curiously
selective record of what some of us were doing in 1975.
And the Adverts?
Net games cost money to develop and run, though not very much. People don't
like paying to play them and it's really too much effort for us to collect
tiny turn fees. So, the deal is that the games are free but come with adverts.
You might decide it's in your interests to buy things from them, at least
if you wanted the things anyway, in order to keep the games running. For
example, everyone buys books and CDs from Amazon, so you might as well
use these search forms and make us rich. Note separate forms for US and UK.
