The Internet Diplomacy Survey

the e-mail/snail-mail crossover

by Nic Chilton

Ever since Diplomacy first came out, it was seen as a game that could naturaly be a play-by-mail (PBM) game, with the increasing popularity of the Internet in recent years we have seen play-by-email (PBEM) Diplomacy, which seems to be attracting larger numbers.
A series of comments from people in a UK Dip PBM zine on whether players of PBEM Dip should be targetted for recruitment to postal zines made me curious to find out for myself the answer to the question are PBEM-ers totally separate from PBM or not?
Earlier this year I conducted a survey of readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.diplomacy over a period of 3 months, reposted at various times to give everyone the chance to participate. The survey was in the following form: 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
                                             YES           NO
                                            -----         ----

A) I play diplomacy by e-mail (eg JUDGE)  [      ]      [      ]


B) I play diplomacy in a postal zine      [      ]      [      ]


C) I sub to a postal zine                 [      ]      [      ]
    (if you've answered NO to (B))


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The final results I got were quite interesting. I had 120 replies from different people around the world which break down as


The results in numbers for each answer were:

Survey results (actual numbers)
US UK OTHER TOTAL
Email Dip 63 15 20 98
Dip in a zine 12 12 3 27
Subbing to a zine 19 15 5 39
None of the above 0 7 0 7

Looking at the actual results further yields more interesting result. For starters if we look at those who said yes to (A) playing diplomacy by email, they fall into three categories:

  • Those who also play snail-mail dip through a zine they sub to
  • Those who also sub to a zine, but don't play in it
  • Those completely enveloped into email play and have nothing to do with zines

    The first two obviously know about dip-zines, but the third either choose not to sub, or more likely haven't seen any postal zines yet.

    The responces given will be looked ay in terms of triples, that is, there answers for questions A, B, C. So a YNN is someone who meets condition 3 above, where as NNY is someone who doesn't play dip but subs to a zine.

    There are six different possible combinations of answers (the nature of question (C) means that those playing in a zine game are assumed to be subbing to it, so there were no YYN or NYN answers - although I'm sure someone would have told me if they fell into one of these situations!)

    The actual results in triple format are seen in the pie-chart below. The actual numbers of replies is given and the percentages is proportional to area (seperately for each ring).

    Lets first look at the YNN replies (those who play purely by email and do not play in or sub to a zine).
    I would say that probably most of the people who answered YNN belong to the category of either non-dip players who first stumbled across diplomacy on the Internet, via the newsgroup (the extremely frequent question of "where can I find the rules for diplomacy" appearing on the newsgroup backs this up), or played the game many years ago, eg at school, and having discoved the newsgroup started playing again.

    UK vs the World

    We see that for outside the UK roughly 75% of replies fall into this category, where as in the UK its less than a third. So a higher proportion of Dip players in the UK are involved in Dip outside the Internet, probably many of them already played Dip before discovering the Newsgroup.

    The other major differences in UK players are the NYY, NNN, and NNY replies.

    The NYY replies are from those who play in a Dip zine but decide not to play in an email Judge game. This also seems to back up the idea that a larger proportion of readers in the UK already played Dip before discovering the newsgroup.

    The NNN and NNY replies only occur in the UK, and there is a simple answer (I think!!). All of the NNN replies are from the Oxford University Diplomacy Club, who obviously prefer face-to-face to all other forms. The NNY I am unsure about, and so will not try and speculate on.

    all over the world

    If you look outside the UK then the percenages of replies are approximately the same. So although the vast majority of people on the Newsgroup are from the US they are not adversly effected differently from most of the rest of the world, as far as diplomacy is concerned.

    ... and finally (an excuse)

    These results could yield alot more, but I have just completed my dissertation which is why this article may seem sketchy. If anyone wants to go further into these results then they are all in the pie chart, and I'm sure no-one would object to letters to the letter column on the subject!

    Cheers

    Nic Chilton.

    [email protected]