Play-by-post or Interactive Storytelling?

When I first started creating the OngoingWorlds website I was faced with many challenges about how to technically build it, but also I had one question which was far more difficult to solve, how do I describe it?

I’ve always been clear in my head what I wanted OngoingWorlds to be. I want it to be a place where a group of people can create a story together. This isn’t an original idea, nor is it unusual. There are thousands of roleplaying games across the internet that people have been playing for years. But everyone seems to call it something different.

Searching for common terminology

One of the most common terms was PBEM, meaning play-by-email, even though the capitalisation of this is not standardised, I created a poll to find out which was the most common way it’s written. This is a term that has existed for a long time, when games were played by email, and before forums existed. Despite this being an accepted term, I decided not to use this term for OngoingWorlds because it’s inaccurate, and anyone just getting into roleplaying might ask what the abbreviation stands for and then get confused when their game isn’t actually played by email at all!

Read More