David “Onion” Ball has once again been kind enough to submit an interesting article to PBEMPlayers.com. The article talks about the importance of rules for PBEM games in general and more specifically when it comes to god-modding - a problem many game master and players of PBEM games face.

You can read this article on PBEMPlayers.com: http://www.pbemplayers.com/ running_your_own_pbem_game/ p2_articleid/35 

About 6 months about I made a blog post titled “PBEM Players statistics”. Now that 2007 is over I thought I’d give you an update. I am happy to say that the statistics still shows that PBEMPlayers.com is among the leaders of the PBEM community!

The number of visits compared to 2006 has increased by 57%, which is really great! Some of these visits are from links on high traffic sites with low quality of targeted visitors such as stumbleupon.com. Not counting any visits from such websites, we are still up by 48% compared to last year!

The bad news is that the visitors spend slightly less time on the site and viewed fewer pages. The last comparison, first half of 2007 against first half of 2006, showed we were up. However, when comparing the entire year against each other, we are down by a just a few percent. I believe there are two reasons for this: A lot of the visitors from websites such as stumbleupon.com click the link without being interested, therefore they go on to other websites after checking out the first page only. The other reason is the lower amount of new material posted lately.

Still, it is very clear the PBEM Players website is now established as one of the leaders of the PBEM community! Thank you all very, very much for your support!

In the article “Creating a character“, David “Onion” Ball takes us through several important things to consider when creating our own character for a PBEM game. Talking from experience, Onion gives several good examples of things to include and things to avoid.

Go on, read the article now: http://www.pbemplayers.com/ character_development/ p2_articleid/34

Would you like to see your article published on PBEMPlayers.com? Please submit it to us using the form on http://www.pbemplayers.com/about_pbemplayers

This article is not about PBEM games in its strictest form, it focuses on using journals/blogs to play. It is actually a very interesting concept that takes PBEM gaming one step further.

I think it raises the question of what a PBEM game actually is, where do we draw the line? There are already games out there using blogs as post archive, instead of a mailing list. The step from that to to journal gaming is rather small in my opinion. Do we need to start calling it “text-based asynchronous roleplaying” instead?

Ginger was very kind to let us post the article here, thank you very much!

Journal gaming guide for email players

A few days late, the spotlight interview is up! This time we get to meet Jay, an experience chat gamer from New York City! Among other things, he tells us about how playing two characters at the same time can cause problems!

Check it out now! July 2007 Spotlight Interview