You Have The Bridge - Internet Simming

by Dan Hartland

I feel I should apologise on behalf of the Galaxy. There isn't a United Federation of Planets. There isn't a Starfleet. The human race hasn't encountered a multitude of life forms or astronomical phenomena. I'm sorry, there's just nothing I can do about it.

Fans of Trek have always fancied seeing the stars, acting Captain Kirk or just plain enjoying a good old headbang with a Klingon. We just can't provide the deck plates beneath your feet, however. The ever-present hum of the warp engines is a long way off. As the old (and yet always annoying) phrase 'you can't have all you want' appears to apply to us.

The best we can do, as a matter of fact, is whip up an internet connection and join what the trade likes to call a "PBeM" - a Play By e-Mail Star Trek simulation.

So What Is It???

Put simply, Play By e-Mail simming is a medium by which you can play at Star Trek. Fundamentally, the player creates a character - their history, their looks, their personality, their area of expertise - and submits this (what simmers call a 'bio') to the Games Master or GM of a sim(ulation) they wish to join.

It's then that the real fun begins. In general, sims split their time up between episodes, just like a TV show. Each episode has its own primary story - the A plot - and each character onboard acts as one of the principle characters (invariably in a sim, these principle characters extend beyond the senior staff a la TNG or VOY) and react to the situation and, when possible, contribute the solution to this episode's problem.

However, there is also room for a multitude of B-plots or character-specific story arcs. Each character develops on a sim in a much more detailed way than limited time can allow on television (if the player is a fair enough writer, that is). The point with Star Trek sims is that all fuse the two real gems of Trek - character and situation - into an often seamless mix.

Stories are told through 'logs' - postings to either an e-Mail string or a single e-Mail address which distributes your log to all those subscribed. It is the quality of logs - which vary from a half-side of A4 to the monster fifteen-pager - which amasses you promotion points and gains you an elevation in rank. Often, other factors, such as contribution to the main story arc (sims emphasise the importance of the A-plot either character B-plots during episodes because otherwise nothing would ever get done) are taken into consideration, too.

Interaction with other characters, through Joint Logs - or a process by which two writers mail drafts of a log or responses to another character's dialogue backwards and forwards to each other until everyone is happy - is a staple element of simming, too, resulting in a widening of the player's writing skills and also increased character development.

But What's The Point?

Sims have no budget and no time constraints as such (episodes can last for a month or two, depending on the posting rate and how much everyone is enjoying a particular scenario). Because of this, they can elaborate on brief mentions in Trek worthy of trivia buffs alone. They can explore many different planets, have no special effects budget, and can easily adapt to whatever the official Trek creators throw at us (for instance, there are several Maquis sims still operating, despite that group's on-screen demise).

The only requirement is that you can write vaguely well (in fact, as long as you *can* write, spelling and such doesn't really matter - sims have many non-English speaking folks for whom English is a second language and, in my experience, many of them are damned good simmers regardless!) and that your imagination is a good one. There are few visual stimuli - although web-pages often provide some - and so a simmer's mind has to visualise the words on the screen.

E-mail simming can, in short, provide what no other medium I know of can provide - a very quick, very entertaining Star Trek experience, sharing that experience with Star Trek fans and/or gifted writers (trust me, some of these people *are* such). It is, as one GM once put it to me "the closest we can get unless we're an astronaut".

Where Do I Start?

The best sim group (a group which provides both listservers and cohesion to a multitude of individual sims) I have ever come across is Allied Electronic Simulations. Situated at http://www.aesim.com, AES have a vast array of Star Trek sims (and some non-Star Trek sims) - from civilian spaceports to Starfleet Intelligence vessels. In my time, I have been a member of several simulations, including the still-running USS Sovereign where I play the Chief Conn Officer. I'm also 'guesting' (yes, folks, once you get the connections you can use a character to 'guest' on other sim's episodes, because AES' Trek sims all take place in the same universe) on the USS Triumph for an episode as a marine character (my oldest character, as a matter of fact, who recently left the Sovereign when the GM decided that, with the end of the Dominion War, the marines would be a redundant group on the ship).

'Marines?' I hear you ask and, yes, there are such a group in many of the sims on-line... just one area sims have managed to elaborate on when the shows don't tell us what we need to know (marines were mentioned in books and, I believe, a select few TV episodes as "special operations").

If you choose to join a sim, I've no doubt you'll have an enjoyable and enlightening experience while your character feels those deck plates beneath his feet. And, if living vicariously in the Trek world is the best we can do, then e-Mail simming is, indeed, the "closest we can get".

And who can say fairer than that?