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.

  • A letter to a 12-year-old

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 67 Comments

    I recently got one of those letters from a student asking about my job. Someday, I suppose, I will be too busy to answer letters like this. But I am not just quite yet. It’s been sitting on my desk guilting me for over a month now.

    So here’s my answer, which may help other 12-year-olds out there wondering about getting into the industry. BTW, if you had to recommend a programming language to today’s 12-year-olds, what would it be?

    Dear _______,

    I’m sorry it took me so long to answer your letter – more than a month! I hope it’s OK with your teacher that I took so long. You’re right that a video game career is cool and fun but very challenging – it also keeps me very busy.

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  • PMOG is going beta…!

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    Justin Hall’s nifty web metagame PMOG is going beta, and you can sign up on their site.

    In short, you install an extension to Firefox. Then you browse. You can leave stuff on pages (like bombs!), gain Xp and level up by browsing, do quests, etc. Basically, it layers an RPG on top of browsing: you even have character classes.

    This is a great example of the inversion in thinking that comes with the Web approach to doing stuff. I remember toying with a similar but different idea back in the SWG days — an MMO that slurped real world web pages into a full 3d world, and that you ran around in “cyberspace” and played an RPG. How obvious it seems now to instead do it outside of a 3d immersive client!

  • SXSW: Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 10 Comments

    I’m not at SXSW (we have way too much going on here at work!) but there’s a great liveblog of a panel I wish I had been at, on Virtual Worlds News, about “Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds”.

    Wu: Will games and virtual worlds eventually compete based not on art and storyline, but on who can offer the most rights to players?

    I hope the answer is “yes.” What’s more, I hope that at some point there’s a minimum standard accepted industrywide and enforced by an industry trade body. As in, companies join the trade body and as part of that they agree to uphold a base set of practices and policies as a condition of membership.

  • The Sunday Poem: The BASICs of life

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 4 Comments

    10 Dimension all your variables, figure out their sides.
    20 Remark, perhaps, on how data twirls across divides.
    30 Print a hello world, as if the world could not read cursive;
    40 Go to thirty, looped but still printed, not recursive.
    50 For once you have some code that doesn’t do much else,
    60 Next you’ll want to make it special, of yourself.
    70 Data will be read, perhaps, or Fibonacci spun,
    80 While you tally figures until the job is done.
    90 Poke a byte, peek a bit, nybble ‘til you’re through,
    100 End with too few memories, dimensions still unused.