Re: wishing for Games Magazine on the web

["MARK THOMPSON" <markthom@flash.net>]

> > i don't know where else to ask this, so i'm asking it here:  does games
> > magazine have a webpage?  can you tell me what the url is?
> >
> You are not talking about the "Abstract Games Magazine"
> (http://www.abstractgamesmagazine.com/), are you?

Abstract Games magazine is excellent,  but there's also "Games Magazine,"
published since the 1970s (with a few breaks), which currently comes out 10
times yearly. In their December issue they publish the "Games 100," their
list of recommended games, which many people use as a kind of Consumer
Reports for games. Also they have a short list, the "Games Hall of Fame," of
games that have been in print a long time and shown enduring appeal -- Twixt
is on it. But most of the year it contains a wide variety of puzzles,
reviews of games, descriptions of newly-invented games that will probably
never become commercialized (many of which would be good on the pbem
server), contests, and articles about games that have made a hit in some
segment of the popular culture.  For instance, I learned about Bid Whist, a
game popular among African-Americans, from an article in Games.

I'm especially interested in Games Magazine because I've written occasional
freelance logic puzzles for them for twenty years. A year back they revised
downward their standard payment schedule because higher postal fees were
cutting painfully into their revenues. The new postal hikes this summer are
again going to cause a lot of magazines inconvenience (or worse), so I'm
concerned about their fate.

Seems to me a website of their own, where they could provide a sampling of
their puzzles and reviews, allow you to subscribe or renew with a credit
card, and have some paid advertisements, and maybe a "subscribers only"
section where a sentry applet asks you to type in the Nth word on the Kth
page of the current issue before it lets you in, would pay for itself and
help their business. But, so far, I don't think there is any "GAMES
On-Line" -- too bad.

Mark Thompson
Chicago