Welcome to Raph Koster's personal website: MMOs, gaming, writing, art, music, books.
Welcome to Raph Koster's personal website: MMOs, gaming, writing, art, music, books.

The whole Web
Raph's Website


Essays
These are full-blown essays, papers, and articles.

Presentations
Slideshows and presentation materials from conferences.

Interviews and Panels
Reprints of non-game-specific interviews, and transcripts of panels and roundtables.

Snippets
Excerpts from blog, newsgroup, and forum posts.

Laws
The "Laws of Online World Design" in various forms.

Timeline
A timeline of developments in online worlds.

A Theory of Fun for Game Design
My book on why games matter and what fun is.

Insubstantial Pageants
A book I started and never finished outlining the basics of online world design.

Links
Links to resources on online world design.



Interviews and Panels

From time to time, people have interviewed me for one reason or another. Sometimes these interviews actually have something of interest in them. So these are the interviews that were interesting, and I'll leave the rest mercifully lost to history.

* Ptah: God of the Mud
"God of the Mud" was done by Laura Mollett, aka Seph, and is a good introductory article about muds and mudding in general.

*Mud Connector (October, 1995)
The Mud Connector interview was done when Legend won Mud of the Month a few years back, and it is mostly about how Legend developed and got started.

*CRPG Tavern (August, 1997)
The CRPGTavern interview is the onlyUO-related interview thus far that doesn't deal solely with UO-centricmaterial. Since it is about general design of muds and online games, I'veincluded it here with the interviewer's permission.

*MediaMOO Conference: Managing Deviant Behavior in Online Communities (January, 1999)
Properly speaking, the MediaMOO conference is not an interview--it's actuallya panel discussion that sort of turned into a roundtable discussion. Theother invited participants were Scott Moore, formerly of WorldsAway, andJennifer Glos, of the ThirdAge website community.

*VaultNetwork Designer Dragon Interview: Community Building (April, 1999)
The VaultNetwork is one of the topnews websites relating to roleplaying games. They asked me to do an interviewon the topic of community building online. It is reproduced here with theirpermission.

*MediaMOO Conference: Using 3D Graphics in Online Communities: Opportunities and Challenges (March, 2000)
Once again, MediaMOO kindly invited me to participate in a roundtablediscussion to celebrate their anniversary. Other participants this year included Lili Cheng, of Microsoft Research; Wendy Kellogg, from the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center; and Hannes Vilhjalmson, from the MIT Media Lab.

*Myschyf's Roundtable: Fiction in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (June, 2000)
The Rantings of Lum the Mad decided to do sometalks with many online game designers gathered in one IRC chat room, and this is whatcame out.

*VaultNetwork Raph Koster Interview (September, 2000)
The VaultNetwork was doing a series ofgeneral interviews with various online game designers, and I was one of them.Reproduced with their permission.

*Joystick101 interview (November 26th, 2000)
Kurt Squire of Joystick101.org did an interview with me on general MMORPG and mud design topics.

*Myschyf's Roundtable: Economic and Political Systems in MMORPGs (November 2nd, 2000)
As before, Myschyf over at The Rantingsof Lum the Mad decided to do a roundtable with a bunch of online game designers from abunch of different games. This is the result.

*Shift.com's Gaming the Matrix (June 13, 2001)
Shift.com did a four-part series onthe question of whether or not online game players would ever find themselves forgettingthere was a real world, as in the movie The Matrix. I was one of theinterviewees. Reprinted here by permission.

*Rapping With Raph (November, 2001)
Computer Games Magazine, in theperson of Mark Asher, did a very lengthy interview as part of a major feature on onlinegaming. Reprinted here by permission.

*What it Takes to be a Junior/Entry Game Designer
This was a little questionnaire that I did for the IGDA.

*Making the AAA Title: Letters from the Trenches (March, 2005)
An interview by Dan Arey of Naughty Dog, as part of his GDC presentation.

*Masaya Matsuura: HyperPS2 interview (November, 2005)
Masaya Matsuura, designer of Parappa the Rapper, did this brief interview with me forHyper PS2 magazine in Japan.

*The KGC Interview: Define the Future (November, 2005)
The 2005 Korea Games Conference sent every speaker a set of interview questions. Here are my replies.

*O'Reilly Village Interview (November, 2005)
Masaya Matsuura did a second interview of me for The Japanese O'Reilly Village website.

*Stratics Areae Interview (December, 2006)
Stratics posted this interview on Christmas Day, 2006, right after Areae was announced..

Child's Play


A Theory of Fun
for Game Design

Cover of A Theory of Fun

Press

Excerpts

Buy from Amazon


After the Flood

Cover for After the Flood CD

Available on CD
$14.99


More stuff to buy

Gratuitous Penguin 2006 Wall Calendar

Gratuitous Penguin 2006 Wall Calendar
$18.99


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