Raph Koster

The Sunday Song: World Trade Center

September 11, 2016March 23, 2017 Music

I wrote this in the days immediately after 9/11. I recorded it onto a 4 track cassette recorder, basically live, then overdubbed some harmony vocals I was hearing in my head.

It’s a sketch. It’s way way long. It’s tentative. Pretty sure the whole thing is all sped up slightly, so if I sound a little chipmunk-like, that’s why.

Somehow, it’s always felt like recording it again would lose the immediacy. So I never have, and I fact I just about never play it. But if there’s a day to post it, it’s probably today.

The stories in the song are all true.

Upcoming talk: Systems Design for Retention

August 15, 2016August 15, 2016 Game talk

4 Comments

I’ve mentioned it a fair amount of Twitter and Facebook, but I wanted to call attention to it here again, for those who still follow such antiquated things as blogs! I’ll be speaking at the newly revived Austin Game Conference, taking place in Austin of course, on Sept. 21 and 22.

For those of you who fondly remember the various incarnations of game conferences in Austin — this event is going to recapture that vibe, I think. The advisory board is pretty much the same crew of folks who curated all those excellent conferences for a decade, starting back in 2003.

My topic:

A Poke-roundup

July 19, 2016July 19, 2016 Game talk

My piece on how “AR is an MMO” traveled far and wide this week. Among the appearances:

I wrote a follow-up entitled “I Really Did Mean MMO” that anyone who liked the first post would probably like.
New World Notes asked me a few questions via Twitter DM, and the result was a little piece on what the game needs to keep thriving. I’ve played it a bunch more since, and have a completely different list at this point, but there it is if you’re interested.
Gamasutra included a snippet in their list of “quotable bits about PokemonGO.” I was also one of several designers interviewed for a story on there about the past and future of AR games.
It’s also in this week’s Critical Distance roundup.
Several MMO sites discussed the post, including Massively Overpowered, Massively Overpowered again, Mein MMO (German), MMO.it (Italian), and MMORPG.com.
So did a bunch of news sites, including El Pais (Spanish), Gamona.de (German), and NYMag — twice, once in a general article about the game, and again as one of the recommended reads in their roundup on “hot takes” on PokemonGO.

There’s probably more to come — I was asked about interviews by several outlets this week, and actually said yes to at least one, as I recall.

If you’re looking for more to read from a game-design specific angle, I recommend

Also, you may recall I mentioned that alternate client views is common in MMOs? Well, here’s your global map of where all the Pokemon are. If you can get in — it’s overloading with traffic.

I really did mean “MMO”

July 14, 2016July 19, 2016 Game talk

10 Comments

A lot of people, as I expected, have focused on the semantics of whether or not “AR is an MMO.” Mostly, they say “well, you really mean ‘it’s like an MMO.'”

It isn’t really “like.” It actually “is.” I think people fall into the trap of thinking that the physical trumps the virtual, but that’s not the case. The virtual trumps the physical, or as Marc Andreessen puts it, software swallows everything.

Think of it this way: the phrase “geotagging” suggests that we are applying a small bit of virtual to the real. But that’s not what is happening at all. What’s actually happening is that we are building a truly massive digital world, and attaching a tiny piece of real to it, via a DB entry with a coordinate.

Currently, there are a zillion databases that hold this sort of data, siloed from one another, but the big project that Google and others have been engaged in for quite some time is to unify them. Amazon’s ASIN is a great example of one such scheme to unify “template IDs” for as many object types as they can. Put another way: the single largest database of “object types” in the world is Amazon’s, and to build it, they basically cloned the existing UPC and ISBN and other such similar databases, plus some, and unified them. They created a metaobject type that became the parent object type, only they own the address space.

Read More “I really did mean “MMO””

AR is an MMO

July 11, 2016July 14, 2016 Game talk

72 Comments

I’ve said this before, but in the wake of the viral success of Pokémon GO, it needs to be said again. Augmented reality is just a virtual world, an MMO, a MUD even, with all of the same design issues, plus a few new ones.

The goggles fallacy

I asked a high-powered Silicon Valley exec about the ethical implications of social VR and AR. Their response was “what ethical implications?”

To some, particularly vets of online worlds of various stripes, this may seem obvious. But most days, it feels like the average person working in social VR, AR, and the like, is ignorant of this. It’s evident in the very large pile of past lessons they are failing to heed in their designs.

The Sunday Song: World Trade Center

Upcoming talk: Systems Design for Retention

A Poke-roundup

I really did mean “MMO”

AR is an MMO

The goggles fallacy

Meta

Policies

The goggles fallacy

Meta

Policies

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