Last year, I wrote a column for the Diplomatic Pouch tracking the game starts in three prominent PBEM communities in 2006. Why? First, I remain a big fan of old fashioned PBEM diplomacy games. I have always preferred them to the play on various automated judges. I think play by e-mail allows for much more creativity and flexibility by both the game masters and the players involved. PBEM games allow for all sorts of press, analysis and commentary to come out simultaneously with an adjudication. This is a great addition to any gaming experience. There are also reduced reliability or accessibility issues with PBEM games. All anyone is needs is a private e-mail account, and there is no judge program to go down.

In this increasingly automated world, games on the various judges are often easier to find and join than games in a non-judge PBEM community. What kinds of opportunities are available to play PBEM diplomacy games? I again perused the records of three different English language PBEM communities that I am familiar with: Cat23, the Diplomatic Corp, and DipWorld. Each has a navigable archive of game results. I compiled data on all 2007 game starts in those three communities.

I am proud to say that I got my first dipping experience in the Cat23 community back in 2000 and 2001 when I first started playing games of Diplomacy on line. Because of that personal history, I still have a strong affinity for this forum, despite the gradual decline in the number of games and players within it. This community uses a number of list serves, one for new game announcements, and others for season by season result postings. Looking over the twenty one game starts from 2007 in the Cat23 community, this is what we have…

The Diplomatic Corp is a slightly newer PBEM community. It is also one of the most active communities in 2007. Forty seven games were started in this community last year. The Diplomatic Corp has a well maintained, user friendly and attractive website. It is quite easy to scour the results of archived games. I would recommend this community to any Dip Pouch author who likes to research and write 'zine articles, because the information to be mined there is extensive. There is no better place to start such a project than by looking at the archived results to get some statistics. Reviewing those forty seven game starts from 2007 in the Diplomatic Corp community, we see…

DipWorld is another one of the classic PBEM communities I researched for this study. Thirty four games were started in this community in 2006. Similar to the Diplomatic Corp, DipWorld also has an attractive and easily navigable website. Here are the twenty three DipWorld community game starts in 2007…

So what are players in our hobby choosing for their gaming experience? It appears that standard Diplomacy is still the "standard" for most players. Over 60% of the games in the three PBEM communities studied above were games of standard Diplomacy. As far as map variants are concerned, the ones that were played multiple times within these three communities in the year 2007 were Ancient Mediterranean, Chromatic, and Imperial.

Let’s also take a moment and the timing of game starts in each of the three communities throughout the year 2007…

Generally, new game starts are pretty consistent throughout the year in each of the three communities. The only real decline appears to be in January and February to start off the year. This is a bit surprising. I would have expected that after the Holiday Season and with a long cold winter ahead, that there would have been a flurry of game starts in those first couple of calendar months.

Admittedly, this is just a small sample of the numerous PBEM communities out there in our hobby. I have chosen these three communities for study each of the last two years because they are all Anglophone communities with which I am familiar and could easily navigate within their websites and listserves to obtain the relevant information. I’m certain there are French and German and Spanish (etc.) language PBEM communities, as well as other English language communities. I would ask other readers of and contributors to the Pouch, who are familiar with these other communities, to prepare a similar treatment about opportunities and trends in PBEM play.

Chris Dziedzic (dipping_chris@yahoo.com)

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