I agree that any PBEM game will have a tendency to be more like a story game. I believe this to be the case because of the nature of the e-mail medium. In e-mail, more time is allowed to received and formulate responses than in normal games. This time lag encourages deliberation and “efficient” responses, i.e. it drives players and GMs to try to accomplish as much as possible in a single post so that you don’t wind up role-playing out four days of story over the course of four years. Of course, some games are very active, posting turns frequently, which I guess would help one overcome this tendency, as would the use of Instant Messaging or Internet Relay Chat.

Another factory pushing the default tendency for PBEM games toward a story milieu is that it is most likely harder for people to feel “immersed” in e-mail. The players are each experiencing a different context when they read the messages, and of course all sorts of contextual/nonverbal clues can be left out if extra care is not taken.

All in all, I’m looking forward to actually trying out a PBEM game and seriously playing it. I’m a player in Barriier Fall War, but we didn’t get very far in that game before it had to go on hiatus.

I feel a bit like a PBEM game may have a tendency to be more like a story game in many respects, although I don’t really know whether this has to be the case.

Some (many? all?) story games also have some immersive element, e.g. in the game of Prime Time Adventures, we spent some time discussing the plot of the “episode” in a very meta way, but also dropped into short, real-time role-played scenes. So it does seem to be that in a story game, you want to go beyond the idea of writing a fictional story, and to create some element of real-life unpredictable drama that needs to be woven into the narrative, similar to the way that history tries to take a series of connected events and create a narrative from them that makes sense to people.