Author: Raph Koster

Raph Koster is a multi-award winning game designer, virtual communities expert, writer and speaker. Check out his full bio to learn more.

  • D&D as a racist tract

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 78 Comments

    Well, here’s a barnburner of an essay and Powerpoint!

    To quote Steve Sumner’s essay again, “Unless played very carefully, Dungeons & Dragons could easily become a proxy race war, with your group filling the shoes of the noble white power crusaders seeking to extinguish any orc war bands or goblin villages they happened across.” I would argue with/ Sumner’s use of the phrase “could become,” and say that unless played very carefully, D&D usually becomes a proxy race war. Any adventurer knows that if you see an orc, you kill it. You don’t talk to it, you don’t ask what it’s doing there – you kill it, since it’s life is worth less than the treasure it carries and the experience points you’ll get from the kill. If filmed, your average D&D campaign would look something like Birth of a Nation set in Greyhawk.

    –Race in D&D.

    It’s “just a game” you say? Check out this quote: Read More “D&D as a racist tract”

  • Google Lively is shutting down

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 18 Comments

    Google Kills Lively, says TechCrunch, and speculates that it is because it never drove sufficient traffic. Lively did get moderately bad reviews around the Net when it launched, but even the traffic that TechCrunch shows on its graph would be a respectable daily user number, if the product could monetize.

    Google’s statement is here.

    …we’ve also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.

    That’s why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.

    They also encourage users to “capture” their hard work in building their rooms “by taking videos and screenshots.” Ouch. Meanwhile, users are gathering in rooms with names like “Lively is Murdered.”

    A bad sign for virtual spaces? Nah — look at the latest figures for investment that Jussi Laakkonen gathered. There’s a very bright future ahead still, for the right products.

  • VWs go to Washington

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments

    As several game news sites are reporting, having connected the dots, virtual worlds are starting a new level of integration with Washington — with the naming of Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach to lead Obama’s FCC transition team, there are now two knowledgeable denizens of the virtual world helping set some policy.

    I first met Kevin at a social policy conference that was themed in part around virtual worlds; I first met Susan at State of Play, the wonderful legal conferences around VW issues. Both are associated with Terra Nova. Kevin is also a Tauren Shaman & a Night Elf Rogue, and Susan is a Second Lifer, plus she has me on her blogroll (hey now…!).

    What will this mean for VWs and MMOs? Nothing right now, I am sure — net neutrality is sure to be a bigger issue. But it’s sure not going to hurt to have people who know the field in the governmental mix.

  • Why are corpse runs bad?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 34 Comments

    In a recent discussion over at f13, folks are cataloging “design errors” from past MMOs. And one of the ones cited was the notion of a corpse run. For those not familiar with this concept, this is where your character dies, leaves all of their stuff at the corpse, and you have to run back to where the corpse is to pick up your gear.

    I argued that corpse runs shouldn’t belong on this list. It’s like calling the telegraph a design gaffe because phones replaced it. Corpse runs were (mostly) all there was at the time, and under the philosophy of “don’t change what works” would have been everyone’s default choice back then.

    Read More “Why are corpse runs bad?”