(???)  Asynchronous Gaming
       I'm really interested in playing multiplayer games over the internet using
       the least amount of bandwidth possible. Why? I don't know; I think I just
       like the niftiness of some things, and this is one of those things that I
       see as being pretty nifty.
       
       Gaming asynchronously just means leaving the next player's turn to be taken
       whenever ready. The tiny save files would be sent through email, allowing
       the receiving player to examine the game state and make a move after
       careful consideration. Board games are an obvious choice for this style of
       play, but there are a couple of other categories I've looked into that
       might be fun to try.
       
       That being said, I wanted to start out with board games because of how
       easily they could adapt to email-based play. Chess, for example, has been
       played for centuries through regular mail by writing out moves on paper,
       and even special postcards were printed to facilitate gameplay.
       
       Today, you can use VASSAL to play board games through email. VASSAL's
       website has hundreds of modules you can download, though it seems to be
       focused on more modern games or wargaming. Either way, there's a feature
       built in for recording your moves and saving them to a file, which can then
       be loaded and played back on the next player's machine.
       
       I don't think there are many standalone games like this. I've heard that
       the newer Civilization games have a play-by-email feature, but I wouldn't
       consider them lo-fi at all, as cool as that might be. I remember Frozen
       Synapse having play-by-email, but I believe the moves and game state were
       still stored on a central server.
       
       That brings me to an idea I had that might work for a few games, most
       likely older ones. Instead of relying on a specific play-by-email feature,
       it might be worth it to try simply saving the game and sending the file
       over. I'm not sure how well this would work for most games; I could see it
       being disorienting to be thrown into the game world with only a written
       explanation of what's going on. I think, however, that it might be fun to
       try out.
       
       It might also be fun to do "simultaneous gaming," in which people play the
       same game and discuss scores, secrets, and other discoveries found while
       playing, as well as just talking about the game itself. A modern example of
       this would be Animal Crossing, in which you usually play alone (though
       there is a normal multiplayer feature) and send items and messages to other
       players, whether or not they're online. I imagine simultaneous gaming to be
       a sort of retro game book club. Play for a week or two and discuss with
       others doing the same thing.
       
       But I recently discovered something cool that would be fun to try. In the
       past, emulators could record gameplay not as videos, but as a set of timed
       inputs as you played the game. These input movies were nothing more than
       text, played back in the emulator with the ROM loaded into it. Retroarch
       still has this feature; if you press 'o' while playing any game, you'll
       start recording an input movie, which is placed in your Saves folder (where
       the SRAM goes) as a .srm.bsv file. These files are played back by launching
       Retroarch through the command-line: retroarch --bsvplay [path/to/bsvfile]
       --libretro [path/to/core] [romfile]
       
       It's that simple. After the input movie is over, the emulator just gives
       control back and the game resumes normally. And what this means is that you
       can record gameplay from any game (and I believe you can even save and load
       save states during the recording) and send the resulting file to Player 2,
       who can then play it back, wait until it's done, and then begin recording
       and playing from there.
       
       You might be thinking to yourself, "Why would I ever want to do this?" I
       think it's fun to ponder, but maybe you have a friend, maybe a pen pal, and
       you want to play games together but aren't usually awake at the same time.
       Maybe you have a very low bandwidth connection, but you still want to play
       games with others. Maybe you're busy and you want to have something to do
       during your off time, but no one is available during that hour. I don't
       know. Maybe it's just something to try out for the fun of it.
       
       There's a somewhat famous instance of this type of gaming going on where
       people pass a Dwarf Fortress save file along, advancing the game for a
       while and then giving control to the next player. Maybe there are other
       games that could benefit from this type of correspondence.
       
       Board games, input movies, passing save files -- there might be other
       methods I'm not thinking of. I'd love to hear other ideas. And if anyone
       wants to try it with me, feel free to send me a message.