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: Grandmother is Forgetting

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 1 Comment

    Some comfort lies in knowing
    A tree’s inner core gilds a human wall,
    And no one pays it mind —

    I stared into her faded eyes, while willing
    Into being a look not a reflection
    Of my own. Her bones have been
    Unlearning youth for years,
    And dry rot clenches whispery hands
    Around her veins. She feels oblivion,
    Perhaps, and rooted fears to die —

    And worse, the fear of being furnishing
    For a mourner’s heart, a comfortable
    Seat for sadness on display, a grief
    Unlearned, replaced, reborn, beveled
    By the familiar gaze of children wishing
    For knowledge, continuation, and belief.

    I pay her mind, in hopes that one will do
    The same for me — ring me, round me, learn
    And ground me, make me theirs, and never burn
    The grains that build me, where they gild me
    through and through.

  • Terra Nova: MMOG eSport?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 5 Comments

    Terra Nova: MMOG eSport? asks the question of whether MMOGs are amenable to eSports.

    Are they good as spectator sport? Would something have to be tweaked in the genre (and in the whole field of play around it) to make them so. And even then, would it be an interesting or good idea?

    It’s sort of an odd question to ask, in some ways, given the history of the genre. Arguably, the games started out with a heavy degree of sport built in. The early games that were full-reset or “Groundhog Day” MUDs had a degree of inspiration from games such as Zork. The core mechanic of an early AberMUD, for example, involved gathering items from around the game and bringing them back to a pool where they were dumped; you earned XP for doing so; in the original Zork, you gathered items from around the game and returned them to a trophy case in the small white house.
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  • A Sad Turn of Events…

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    If you’ve been looking for LegendMUD or the old version of the website, this may explain where it’s gone:

    On the morning of 11/20, Legend experienced what can only be described as a catastrophic failure. The controller which manages all of the peripheral drives failed, taking it with the logic boards on the hard drives as well as the CD ROM drive. It was a shock as well to find that the off-machine/off-site backup procedures had also been silently failing.

    Attempts at recovering the data have thus far been unsuccessful.

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