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.

  • The Sunday Poem: Peace

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 7 Comments

    Peace shouldn’t be quiet, clouds soft and pliant,
    A mellow sky scene in blue.
    Peace should be blaring, a jazz band past caring,
    A squabble of children and you.
    The clangor of pots, your eyes full of spots,
    Buttercups growing in dew.
    Peace is invention, it’s sustained attention,
    It’s chemistry going kaboom.
    It’s racing of go karts and artichoke hearts
    And farming in Kalamazoo.

    It’s silence as well, but the silence of bells
    The moment they still for a few;
    An aftershock sound that echoes around
    And gives way to rush and to hue.
    It’s not smug inertia, safe from what hurts ya;
    Pain is what gives us the glue.
    It’s temperate intemperance, all quantum events,
    Mosquitoes buzzing canoes.
    A whole raucous party, that’s peace’s priority:
    Space to be scattered and true.

  • Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother

    Hours Categories Reading
    Comments 5 Comments

    Little Brother, by Cory DoctorowMaking Light has a post about Cory’s new book, promising to send advance reader copies to bloggers who talk about the book. All the copies are gone, of course, since we live on Internet time.

    But I’ve been lucky enough to have read it at various stages of development over the last year. So I don’t need a copy. 🙂 Connections have their privileges!

    And the bottom line is, go buy Little Brother when it goes on sale in twelve days. It’s aimed at teens. Don’t let that stop you. It’s not a space opera, a military SF novel, not a Singularity sort of thing, and there are no elves. Don’t let that stop you either. Because it’s urgent, and real, and you will learn something from it.

    It’s a book about a kid whose town (San Francisco) gets attacked by terrorists, and who finds it then slipping into a sort of Homeland Security nightmare. A kid who fights back with the tech he has to hand — videogame consoles and ARGs and friend networks. And also a lot of guts.

    It’s a story not only about paranoia and freedom, but also about security and insecurity. The hacks described are real; there’s an afterword with real-world resources.

    I am looking forward to reading it again, between proper covers instead of on loose sheets of paper.

  • Scary stats redux

    Hours Categories Open thread, Writing
    Comments 2 Comments

    Back at the end of 2006, I noted that thanks to stat-tracking stuff here on the blog, I could tell that I had written 340,000 words on the blog over the years. That’s just blog posts, not counting anything in the site proper, mind you.

    Well, here we are a year and quarter later, and there’s 540,000 words there now.

    So I really need everyone to go back and tag them all. 🙂

  • In-world taxes could hit Sweden

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    Not sure how I missed this before!

    Sweden moves to tax in-game transactions | Virtual Economy Research Network

    Transactions between participants in a virtual world, where the deal is about the sale of a “product” or a “service” against reimbursement in an internal currency, should be considered, according to the Swedish Tax Agency’s ruling, [actual] sales of electronic services, if the internal currency can be exchanged to a valid legal means of payment. If the internal currency cannot be exchanged to money, the transactions should not be considered [actual] sales.

    Edit: to be clear, the reason this is important is because it refers to taxing in-world earnings prior to cashout. Limited to virtual currencies with a cashout mechanism, but still — the line isn’t drawn where the virtual currency becomes “real.”