Play-by-mail Game - Postal Gaming

Postal gaming developed as a way for geographically separated gamers to compete with each other. It was especially useful for those living in isolated areas and those whose tastes in games were uncommon.

In the case of a two player game such as chess, players would simply send their moves to each other alternately. In the case of a multi-player game such as Diplomacy, a central game master would run the game, receiving the moves and publishing adjudications. Such adjudications were often published in postal game zines, some of which contained far more than just games.

The commercial market for play-by-mail games grew to involve computer servers set up to host potentially thousands of players at once. Players would typically be split up into parallel games in order to keep the number of players per game at a reasonable level, with new games starting as old games ended. A typical closed game session might involve one to two dozen players, although some games claimed to have as many as five hundred people simultaneously competing in the same game world. While the central company was responsible for feeding in moves and mailing the processed output back to players, players were also provided with the mailing addresses of others so that direct contact could be made and negotiations performed. With turns being processed every few weeks (a two week turnaround being standard), more advanced games could last over a year.

Game themes are heavily varied, and may range from those based on historical or real events to those taking place in alternate or fictional worlds.

Inevitably, the onset of the computer-moderated PBM game (primarily the Legends game system) meant that the human moderated games became "boutique" games with little chance of matching the gross revenues that larger, automated games could produce..