History
PbP has its origins on the large computer networks and bulletin board systems of major universities in the United States in the 1980s, and drew heavily upon the traditions of fanzines and off-line role-playing games. The introduction of IRC enabled users to engage in real-time chat-based role-playing and resulted in the establishment of open communities.
Development of forum hosting software and browser-based chat services such as AOL and Yahoo Chat increased the availability of these mediums to the public and improved accessibility to the general public. The popularity of PbP games peaked in the early 2000s with online chat services and free remotely hosted message boards such as invisionFree and ProBoards, and has seen a decline in favor of graphical MMORPGs in recent years.
Read more about this topic: Play-by-post Role-playing Game
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)