Essays
These are full-blown essays, papers, and articles.
Presentations
Slideshows and presentation materials from conferences.
Interviews and Panels
Reprints of non-game-specific interviews, and transcripts of panels and roundtables.
Snippets
Excerpts from blog, newsgroup, and forum posts.
Laws
The "Laws of Online World Design" in various forms.
Timeline
A timeline of developments in online worlds.
A Theory of Fun for Game Design
My book on why games matter and what fun is.
Insubstantial Pageants
A book I started and never finished outlining the basics of online world design.
Links
Links to resources on online world design.
All contents of this site are
© Copyright 1998-2010
Raphael Koster.
All rights reserved.
The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily endorsed by any former or current employer.
I still sigh when I read this. But I lived off the anecdote for months.
The other day during the tutorial we ran, I had a very scary experience. I asked the audience of a few hundred, "So, how many of you have played EQ?" And four hands went up. "Really? Wow, I'm surprised," I commented--since these days it seems like I can't go to the grocery store without overhearing someone talk about their 23rd level necro.
"OK, how many of you played UO?" Five hands. More than EQ. Surprising. "Asheron's Call?" Around a dozen hands--OK, it keeps getting weirder. "Other?" A few stragglers, like five maybe.
Then I asked the biggie. "How many of you are currently making or soon plan to be making a massively multiplayer online world?"
All the hands went up.
It was all I could do not to sigh into the microphone... "...doomed. You're all doomed."
This incident occurred at the Game Developer's Conference in 2001, when Amy Jo Kim, Rich Vogel and I ran a tutorial together on community building for massive online worlds.
