player-run organizations, and often their own newsletters. Many play-by-mail alliances span continents, and occasionally generations, and last for years. The games have their own histories as well. StarWeb, one of the most successful play-by-mail games, has completed over a thousand cycles of its interstellar contest.
“There are about 10,000 players involved in games at the moment. Although there has been a big push for the last five years urging
people to send their turns via computer networks like CompuServe or MCI Mail, only about 10 percent do so. The computers which run the games are invisible, and don’t interest players. Play-by-mail gamers like mail. They can forward a message to other players