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.
All contents of this site are
© Copyright 1998-2010
Raphael Koster.
All rights reserved.
The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily endorsed by any former or current employer.
Twinking has come to mean a different thing in massively multiplayer games than
it did on text muds. Whereas in MUDs and MUSHes, a "twink" was what is now variously called
anything from a "n00b" to a "grief player," on EverQuest in particular twinking
came to mean was used to be called "powerlevelling" or "levelling someone," most
specifically by giving them equipment they could never have earned on their own. In
what's below, I am using the MMO definition.
First, a definition: twinking is the act of a higher-level player helping a lower level player rather than the lower level player doing everything themselves.
Hurm. That doesn't actually sound like a bad thing. Where it can be a bad thing is where they only help their friends, where some people get left behind, or where large amounts of content get skipped because you get twinked past them.
Fundamentally, newbies getting helped or greeted by advanced players is a GOOD thing. It means that people who otherwise might have had a crummy experience because they had no friends or got intimidated by this rich, huge, wonderful game :) instead get to have a good experience, and come back for a second session.
What needs to happen is to institutionalize this process so that it happens fairly and equally, without damaging the game for either other players or for us the admins. And that's our goal. So in THAT sense, we're proud to say that we want to encourage twinking. :) But we want it to happen in very specific ways. Fortunately, we can build into the game system incentives for it to happen in those ways.
I think it was Damion Schubert who first made the observation to me that twinking wasn't necessarily a bad thing...
