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.

How Virtual Worlds Work, part two
September 30, 2021November 1, 2021 Game talk, Gamemaking
1 Comment

Last week I wrote about the challenges of moving art between virtual worlds – especially the long-standing dream of moving avatars across wildly different worlds and experiences.

How Virtual Worlds Work
1: Clients, servers, and art
2: Maps
3: Object templates and instances
4: Object behaviors
5: Ownership

Something I didn’t touch on is whether this is a dream you actually want.

Chasing the wrong dreams

There are a lot of things people assume they want out of a metaverse which don’t really hold up under close scrutiny.

Do you really want to move your avatar between a fantasy world and a gritty noir world set in the Prohibition era? Even if it shatters all immersion when you head into a speakeasy and someone casts a fireball spell at you?

Do you really want to be in a ten thousand person battle with the latest weapons technology if it means you get headshot by a sniper a mile away that you never got to see, dodge, or avoid in any way?
Read More “How Virtual Worlds Work, part two”

Read More How Virtual Worlds Work, part two
How Virtual Worlds Work, part one
September 23, 2021November 1, 2021 Game talk, Gamemaking

Apparently, our recent articles have caused a bit of a stir. It’s been gratifying to see so many folks commenting and weighing in on what we have planned, and the metaverse in general.. One thing that’s really struck me is the enthusiasm for the reinvention of online world technology. Whether a particular commenter is focused on decentralization, player ownership, or user creativity, there’s clearly a lot of interest in new ways of doing things.

How Virtual Worlds Work
1: Clients, servers, and art
2: Maps
3: Object templates and instances
4: Object behaviors
5: Ownership

In my experience, whenever we are exploring new ways to approach old concepts, it’s important to look backwards at the ways things have been done before. A lot of these dreams aren’t new, after all. They’ve been around since the early days of online worlds. So why is it that some of them, such as decentralization, haven’t come to pass already?

The answer lies in the nitty gritty details of actual implementation. A lot of big dreams crash and burn when they meet reality – and some of our most cherished hopes for virtual worlds have pretty big technical barriers.

Read More “How Virtual Worlds Work, part one”

Read More How Virtual Worlds Work, part one
But First, the Game
September 16, 2021September 16, 2021 Game talk, Gamemaking
1 Comment

In the last couple of articles, I might have spent too much time talking about big buzzwords – metaverse this and persistent state technology that. I get it, it can be confusing!

If I were to start throwing around even more technical stuff – like, how we drive Node.js from our highly-optimized C# server backend to implement a TypeScript-based scripting environment so gameplay code can be reloaded without a build or restart – well, plenty of people’s eyes might glaze over.

So instead, I want to talk about why our overall tech approach makes for better lives for our developers and better games for our players.

A fundamental truth

To make better games, we need to enable developers to iterate faster.

Read More “But First, the Game”

Read More But First, the Game
Revealing Playable Worlds technology
September 9, 2021September 9, 2021 Game talk, Gamemaking
8 Comments

Last week, I talked about “metaverse,” the hype around it, and how much of what people dream about is actually stuff online worlds have done for many years now. I ended the article on a bit of a tease, promising that I would talk about what we are doing.

I won’t tease this time.

We have built a metaverse platform.

Wait, did you say “have built?” Past tense?

Oh, it’s not done. We’re probably going to be working on this for years. But I say “built” because, well, we have the basics of this stuff working.

Read More “Revealing Playable Worlds technology”

Read More Revealing Playable Worlds technology
Online world or metaverse?
September 2, 2021September 2, 2021 Game talk

A lot of people are talking about the “metaverse”, and as a result, a lot of folks are wondering what the heck that word even means.

Frankly, it’s a reasonable question. But as someone who has actually built, launched, and operated a metaverse before, I have answers!

I recently spoke at the Digital Economy Forum, hosted in Korea by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and organized by the Korea Startup Forum. After the panel, we got the question “what’s the difference between Second Life and a metaverse?”

Here’s the short-form answer:

Online worlds lead to multiverses which lead to metaverses. And just about no one has actual metaverses to offer right now.

Read More “Online world or metaverse?”

Read More Online world or metaverse?

Author: Raph Koster

How Virtual Worlds Work, part two

Chasing the wrong dreams

How Virtual Worlds Work, part one

But First, the Game

A fundamental truth

Revealing Playable Worlds technology

Wait, did you say “have built?” Past tense?

Online world or metaverse?

Meta

Policies

Chasing the wrong dreams

A fundamental truth

Wait, did you say “have built?” Past tense?

Meta

Policies

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