and plot was perfectly suited to the arcane logic and aloof fairness of the computer. Early computer adventure games carried the vocabulary of role-playing games onto the screen, awarding players for finding a way through the maze, but not encouraging creative pretending.
Games-by-mail today combine the logical challenge of the computer with the intrigue of role playing. They are amazingly detailed scenarios played out by an army of long-distant gamers submitting their turns to a central game-master computer, to be weighed and calculated, then tabulated into a printout sent by return mail. It’s a little bit of bureaucratic warfare. By the middle of the game I have to keep in mind that before I leave a planet I