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.

  • Players who attack pirate servers

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 27 Comments

    imaekgaemz.com » On Player Loyalty

    After finding a pirate Meridian59 server…

    I spend the rest my time in this illegal world schmoozing with the admins, trying to finagle server access to cause a little havoc. After an hour or so of this, everyone on the server is killed by an admin command (I didn’t do it.) Amidst the OMG WTF NOOB ADMIN broadcasts from all the players who just lost their last hour of character building–and all the gear they had, I notice there are are two new admin characters logged in with the names “Psychochild” and “Q.”

    While laughing my ass off, I call Brian hoping to hear his trademark cackle while he and Rob wreck another pirate server… but he has no idea what’s going on. “So wait,” I say… “You’re not logged into this server right now?”

    No, he wasn’t– So I log back on and start talking to the false PC and Q. — Long story short, it turns out that they are two old players from NDS’s Meridian59 who don’t play anymore, but have taken down quite a few pirate servers.

    An interesting read. 🙂

  • The multi-head world

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    It’s nice to finally see real movement towards a very old idea, the world that surfaces radically different experiences on different client platforms. With the announcement that Disney Fairies will have a Nintendo DS version, we see this finally coming to fruition.

    Making clients that work on more than one platform or device is a tricky challenge, and one thing that has been talked about forever it seems is the notion of having a separate client that accesses a different portion of the world than the main client. For example, every MMO I have ever been involved with has discussed the notion of a cell phone client just for auctions, trading, checking your shops, and other sorts of low-rendering-requirements tasks.  And yet, the movement towards this stuff always seems sort of tentative.

    Disney’s jumping in with both feet, with the notion from the get-go being that Fairies is a property you interact with on many levels, and the DS version and the web version are just two ways (with perhaps “central authority” existing in the web version). For that matter, the toys are also just another way.

    When you are engaged in the process of building alternate realities, this is the right way to think about it. The client is just a window into a larger world. Creators should be thinking of their worlds as properties and entities that exist independent of rendering method, interaction method, and so on. And the strongest properties will be those which are not rendering dependent and yet retain a strong central creative identity, designed for everywhere.

    Universal client will come — but there are always going to be different real life situations that demand different levels of engagement, and you want your players to be able to engage in every way they might want. Forcing them to sit at a desk is to force them to interact with your brand your way, not their way.

  • ATOF in Game Informer’s top ten game books

    Hours Categories Game talk, Reading, Watching, Writing
    Comments 5 Comments

    I got an email about this recently, but haven’t seen it myself. Apparently Game Informer picked the top ten books on gaming, and A Theory of Fun is on the list at #9. Perfect timing of course, given that it’s out of print and I get three inquiries a week on how to get ahold of a copy. Working on it…

    David Kushner, author of the excellent Masters of Doom (which I have the galleys of somewhere around here, and which came in at #1) managed to type in the full list. I’ll have to see if I can find a copy of the article.

    Edit: here’s the article.A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster. In this book, Koster aims a bit higher than the normal historical analysis of the game industry. Instead, the former chief executive officer of Sony Online Entertainment aims to define just what terms like “game” and “fun” actually mean. His answers are fascinating and a must-read for anyone concerned with the art of video games, but what’s more impressive is that Koster – an eccentric and highly skilled writer – actually manages to make this high-brow discussion accessible and, yes, even fun to read. Through an often hilarious mix of academic discussion, first-person anecdotes, and hand-drawn cartoons, Koster brings the reader closer to understanding what role games of all sorts play in human life and what we mean when we say something is “fun.” All in all, it’s a fascinating and unique book that should be required reading at the world’s many video game college programs.

  • Brief notes: IGE, Shanda, SmallWorlds

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments
    • The Hernandez case in Florida, where IGE is being sued for damaging the WoW gameplay experience, is trying seeking class certification. This was always their intent, so I suppose really, I am just pointing out that the slow gears continue to grind on.
    • In other legal news, a Legend of Mir 2 player is suing Shanda, trying to get monetary damages for the value of the in-game items that they lost due to some sort of technical glitch. In other words, a “virtual property” case. The player had been buying these items, and Massively did the math, working out that the guy had spent almost $30,000.
    • SmallWorlds is about to launch — basically, it lets you make isometric multiplayer apartments and embed them on pages and link them. They are apparently planning on lots of Hollywood tie-ins. It will be interesting to see how this goes, given the similarities to Whirled, which has not set the world on fire yet despite being very cool. Using the “open big” estimation method and eyeballing their curve using the numbers they report on the site, they look to be on track to peak around 20-30,000 users unless they manage to crack another market or go viral. Naturally, we’re watching all this kind of closely since Metaplace bears some similarities to both of these.

  • The market glut

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 19 Comments

    Nielsen is saying that Club Penguin is stalling out — not much, just a -7% growth year on year from last April to this April.

    Of course, with the quantity of kids’ worlds coming into the market now, this is not really surprising, is it? I mean, I was at the grocery store this weekend, and there was a rack of Beanie Babies 2.0 with giant “play online!” tags hanging on them. It may be that this is the death of “Web 2.0,” when it gets co-opted for Beanie Babies.

    At left here is the rack of game cards available at Target — snapped this weekend, and strongly reminiscent, finally, of similar shots I have taken in Korea, Japan, and China. For years, there was no such rack in the US. Then it was just a couple of cards, and only at some checkouts. Now it gets a rack right between the TV box sets and the top pop albums (you can see REM’s latest CD there, abandoned on the top shelf).

    Besides the cards you maybe expect to see, like Club Penguin, WoW, and Zwinky, there’s also a large stack of ’em for gPotato games (Flyff, Shot Online, etc) And Acclaim, which make their living by bringing over games from Korea. There’s WildTangent cards, and the Gaia cards are almost sold out. The diversity is interesting, as is the lack of cards for most of the core gamer MMORPGs. The strong presence of the often-marginalized Korean games is telling.

    Meanwhile, I hear that Age of Conan has something like 700,000 units in the pipe for day one, which is either a business blunder or a sign of high pre-orders and pent-up demand. WoW players looking for something new to sink their teeth into?

    We’re starting to see the fragmentation that can come from having so many offerings on the market. How many kids’ worlds can actually survive?

    I actually think the answer is “just about all of them.” If online continues to chew through the gaming market, this rack could be the size of a Gamestop someday — one stack of cards per game, in a world where all the games try to drive alternate revenue streams regardless of platform.