Of course, it's a got to be a lot of work to write a computer moderated
pbm; I've had several false starts on one myself. I'm surprised, though,
that more people haven't written games and made them publicly available.
Certainly, even if a game was slated for the commercial market, the net
would be a good place to playtest it (faster turnaround, easy to get a
pool of playtesters).
The slow turnaround of PBM is a drawback, but the format has several
advantages over interactive multi-player games: everyone doesn't have
to be logged in at once, you have more time to work on strategy, and
you don't have to be on the internet to play... It seems that the latest
round of multi-player adventures have even given up the pretense of being
games, and are little more than elaborate 'chat' programs.
I'm most interested in full computer moderated, epic-style, open ended games.
Please, spare me the "Well, go write one then!" flames. I'm trying,
but I'm curious to know if there are others out there writing/designing PBMs.
Is there any public domain PBM code available?
Rich
-- skrenta@amix.commodore.com