Why I like the computer aided gaming I use so much?

How do I play at home today? I only have one resident player at the moment. As I live with her, we do play at our home. It is easy. Schedules are easy to work out and we can get really fast to play a game. But we have a twist how we play. We use messenger for that. But why?

Years ago we tried for fun to play by writing. We only got one PC and just opened text editor and wrote what player and gamemaster would normally say in the course of game. I wrote description and player wrote how her character reacted that. We decided to try that out because we were curious would we get more detail to descriptions when we wrote them. And we did.

It's like writing an interactive book. You have to pay more attention when writing and also get more focused how you play the situation. But we only write down directly game related roleplaying. All clarifications and rule and system related stuff we talked.

Later when we got our own computers we decided to try this with messenger. Similar, but easier as both have more space around.

Also it is great that after a gaming session I can just copy what we just played and paste it to text editor and save. We get a perfect fictional log of our games we can refer back and most important, read later about our games.

Currently I am saving our Fading Suns campaigns game logs to my rpg campaign blog called Kronikat - Chronicles (you can find it here in Finnish, and here with Google translation to English). I have to say how many little details and cool things or even full scenes are forgotten. It's fun to save them to blog and read what has happened in previous games.

I am not sure how this would work with full group of players in same room. Not as fun I guess if everyone's behind their computer. But still we do interact a lot while playing discussing about game related things, rules etc. We just directly write what happens in game. Details are discussed separately if needed and then written also down if necessary.

I have to say I like this method of gaming. It suits us really well and I really enjoy reading later how our games went.