MEPBM:Bill Field Speaks From: swater@esd.sgi.com (Adam Waters) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 19:10:39 +0000 Rochelle, exactly! The e-mail is ok but not tops. The whole problem is the data entry. Which is why I asked Bill why they don't set up a server and let people telnet in and enter their own orders. Or, set up a fax that has OCR(optical character recognition). Or how about a scantron? Could that work for some things? It's interesting that you say some e-mail formats get messed up in the transition. I hadn't thought of that but it makes sense. There is definitely a way around the problem tho. As for money, lots of people use their credit cards. OR in my case, I fax my turns in in a hurry and mail my checks in at my leisure. If you keep a decent balance this should be no problem. And I pretty much never send cards after about turn 3. But, overall, GSI does an excellent job of entering orders correctly and compensating when they don't. I'm not complaining about their performance in this regard. I'm just curious about it. Mostly, it seems to me that they must spend huge ammounts of money on data entry, printing hard copies, and postage. All these things are easilly eliminated using digital solutions. Furthermore, this led me to think about variety. Often i hear the complaint that the games get stale. Standard moves develop. People get bored. But why should this be? I asked them why there isn't more variety. Once you have the base program, isn't it realitively easy to alter it? Can't they alter more things game to game: encounters, artifacts, characters, etc... Getting a 10 pt bonus across 8 characters isn't my idea of variety. This is what I thought... Also, getting back to the info-technology, I've read a number of postings from players in australia and england. On one of my teams, we have a teammate in japan. It's hard to play from these places. But there's no reason this has to be. All we're doing is moving information right? Is GSI thinking internationally at all? Do they advertise overseas? I don't know. I can imagine a time not too far away, when pbem will be world-wide, turns will come in over the net with video and audio effects of movie quality, and game variety will be extensive. This could be really cool and potentially attract a much wider audience. We're not there yet, we don't have the bandwidth for one thing. People aren't hooked up in big enough numbers either, tho of course this is changing rapidly. And a little company like GSI just doesn't have the cash or energy to be the pioneer, which is unfortunate. Mostly I just wanted to get some discussion going on the subject. We'll be seeing it for a long time. Adam -- ---------------------------------------- ~ Adam Waters ~ ~ swater@engr.sgi.com ~ ~ ~ ~ "All's fair in love and core." ~ ---------------------------------------- Referenced By Up