Website

To prepare for coming changes to the website, I have updated the way the PBEM links are displayed. You will soon be able to create your own account here and submit links and articles to the website!

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

If you have written anything you think would be of interest to the general PBEM community, we would love to post it on PBEMPlayers.com! It does not matter if it's long or short, as long as it is interesting and of use for at least larger parts of the PBEM (pbem/forum/any type of free-form textbased roleplaying) players.

You will be credited with whatever name or alias you like, and I'll keep any links or banners in the article (within reason). This is a great way to promote your game! 

Please use the form available at http://www.pbemplayers.com/about_pbemplayers to submit your material. But do remember that  it must be something you have written yourself, and not something you found and copied from the Internet.

Yes, I know... the Spotlight Interview for July 2007 is not up yet. I am actually still waiting for the answers to my interview questions. But since it is summer I suppose most of you are out in the sun, and not sitting in front of your computers writing for PBEM games... or? :-)

Anyway, I hope to receive it within the next day or so, and I will post it as soon as possible!

I've been playing around a bit with Google Analytics to track the progress of this website.

I compared the first half of 2007 with the first half of 2006 and found that we're doing exceptionally well! The number of visits compared to last year is up more than 35%! That alone speaks for the success of PBEMplayers.com in the PBEM community!

It does not stop there though; the success is remarkably obvious in all areas! More of you stay once you get here, and you stay longer. It also looks like you return more often than a year ago.

All this speaks for itself; it shows that the PBEM Players website is indeed one of the most important websites in the PBEM community today! Thank you all very much for your continuing support and feedback! It is all of you that make it worthwhile to do it!

The first Spotlight interview is online! This month it features Andy Longman, moderator for the PBEM game Blue Dwarf. He has some very interesting thoughts on the different aspects of PBEM gaming as well as plenty of stories and interesting characters to share with us!

Check it out now, PBEM Players Spotlight Interview!