Re: Spellbinder Games - best avoided!

From: David desJardins <desj@math.berkeley.edu>

Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 00:00:00 +0000

Greg Lindahl <lindahl@pbm.com> writes:
> Well, lots of other folks disagree with you. It sounds to me like
> you're defining a "good email game" and then claim that only good
> email games are PBEM.

I'm sure that many people do "disagree" with me, in the sense of using
terms differently than I do.

But I never said that the games that I think of as PBEM are any better
(or worse) than other games that happen to use (or potentially use)
email as a transport mechanism.  In fact I think there are many good
reasons why one might want to design games which send and/or receive
binary data, and email would be one potential transport mechanism for
that data.  (Although I'd recommend against making it the only choice of
transport mechanism; for many people, it would be more convenient to
send and receive binary data some other way, while most people do find
email convenient for text messages so it's more reasonable in that case
to make it the only choice.)

I think the distinction is between using email protocols (i.e., SMTP) to
send and receive email (i.e., text messages), or to send and receive
binary data.  In my mind the term PBEM incorporates the term "email" in
the latter rather than the former sense.  I expect that in the near
future the word "email" will appear in dictionaries in (at least) these
two different senses.

David desJardins

References

Re: Spellbinder Games - best avoided!
David desJardins <desj@math.berkeley.edu>
Fri, 27 Nov 1998 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Spellbinder Games - best avoided!
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Mon, 30 Nov 1998 00:00:00 +0000