PBEM v93 n01 (15Jan93)

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Players - The Most Valuable Asset                        Luis Sequeira
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The quality of PBEMs (and PBMs) is often judged by many different
factors, such as their rules, complexity, the degree of flexibility
the player has when dealing with the "things" which he commands in the
game (be they medieval armies or starship fleets), and the support the
player can get from the GM (e.g., rules, tools, etc.).  It is usual
for new games to claim "a flexibility unlike any other game", "full
so-and-so support", "lots of rules for the most demanding player to
always be able to do what he wants", etc. This is normal, and all
comparisons between games are done using similar concepts. Some of
these concepts can be subjective and a matter of personal taste (such
as realism and playability), but many others (such as support and
rules) are not --- they are quite objective and have a great influence
on the immediate success (or failure) of the game.

However, as some readers have already discovered in some of my
previous articles, there are other important issues, which are never
mentioned on the "praise list" of the games I've found. One of these
issues is the players. After all, complex or simple, realistic or
purely abstract, large or small, the players make the game a fun
experience --- and it's rarely the other way round. You can have the
most complex and realistic game ever designed, but if your players
aren't up to it, the game will quickly be forgotten and discarded. On
the other hand, very simple games with a handful of (badly written)
rules can be a lot of fun, just because the players are a exceptional
bunch of guys, who give their best, even in a poorly designed game.

Why is that so? Well, to be perfectly honest --- and I'm not adding
anything new here --- games were created so that players could enjoy
playing them! This may sound terribly trivial, but it seems that some
games out there have forgotten this simple and universal truth. It
also seems that game designers painfully add new features which don't
appeal to any one else but a programmer, and use these new features as
a "marketing statement". Say, "this game is written in C++ and has
over 3 Mbytes of object-oriented code, having been successfully ported
to over 300 different environments". Very impressive indeed, but how
many players have actually joined the game? If it's written in
Microsoft's GW BASIC (1983 version), and has a few hundred lines of
spaghetti code, it can be as fun as any other masterpiece of
programming. I've seen a game written for the Commodore Amiga using a
database manager, which runs from diskettes, that is loved by its 50+
players.

Perhaps a bit of world history can shed some new light on the subject;
I won't be very extensive, as I'm barely familiar with the subject,
but there have been some events in the past which can be shown to
conform to some aspects of games. Consider, for instance, the World
War II period. I've read in the 2300 AD role-playing game from GDW
(which itself has evolved from a PBM run by the staff of GDW for a few
years, to get them an interesting background on future events) that
this was the "Strong Leader" period.  The many countries had different
political views, and different government forms --- but all of them
(at least those which have an entry in the history books) had a strong
leader.

In a game, the situation has some parallels: all the decisions, all
the embodiment of power over the "land" (or the stars) is centered on
the player. He is the ultimate leader of his people, and his
decisions, right or wrong, will influence the outcome of future
events.  That is why it is so frustrating when a player quits the game
and is replaced by another with different views and opinions.

In a PBEM, a player must do a lot of role-playing, whether one is
aware of it or not. If five players unite themselves under the same
overlord, and achieve some success in the game, what will happen if
the overlord suddenly quits the game --- or worse, engages in suicidal
attacks against others? Will there be stability afterwards?  Are your
neighbors to be trusted? What about "temporary" alliances?  Will one
benefit from them later on?

So, if a game has a surprisingly large number of good players, deeply
involved with the game, everyone benefits from it, even if you lose
some battles. There is a distinct satisfaction from being defeated by
a clever player, and not by a soulless machine which constantly throws
fighters blindingly and without purpose against you.

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The net has been busy for a while with the question of "automatic
players", i. e., to put some measure of artificial intelligence in the
"things" the players control. In other words, to get some things to
automatically run by themselves without the players having to bother
with them.  My own opinion on the subject is a quite positive one - as
long as such changes improve the quality of the player interactions
instead of degrading them. If the players can have more time to spend
on conversations between themselves, and can concentrate on diplomacy
instead of having to run a spreadsheet to calculate their best moves,
then the change will be a welcome one. If, on the other hand, what is
accomplished is a means of turning the player in an unnecessary figure
on the game, that is, a mere "spectator" of the scenario played by the
computer, then forget it.  While several "boring" tasks can - and
should - be automatic, the most important thing in the game is the
player, and he must feel that he is in charge. Thus, if he is
relegated to a role where he can give his "underlings"
(computer-played agents) several commands to relieve his burden, and
can instead plot treason and backstabbing against other players, well,
then the game is going in the right direction.

There are a few games where the player seems to be just an
inconvenience for the game to run well. That is, his "stupid" orders
and commands just slow the flux of play, and are restricted to the
minimum. I'm talking about games where you just give the orders, see
what the computer has done with them, and watch the reports with all
the fascination of one reading a newspaper's article about the
rainfall in Mongolia (or Portugal, for that matter! :-).

This clearly isn't what PBEMs are about.

To finish, I'll add the main reason why I insist so often on the
importance of the players in PBEMs. As a teenager, I discovered the
world of computer arcade games, and liked it a lot - but it always
infuriated me when I just couldn't do what I wanted. Computers being
the mindless machines they are, there's just about a limit on the
different things one can perform. While "migrating" to role-playing
games, I enjoyed the wonderful experience of being able to do
_exactly_ what I wanted - because I was dealing with human players,
limitless in their imagination. Many "good" wargames permit similar
"freedom". PBEMs are the kind of games that permit you the largest
amount of players possible, and coming from all corners of the world.
Thus, one would expect PBEMs to be able to mimic the "real world" more
and more, at least with what concerns player relations (on a RPG, it's
always the GM who plays the "bad guys"...).

Thus, players is what PBEMs are really about. Pity they are so often
neglected...