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Raph Koster

Raph Koster

Game designer, author, speaker

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Raph Koster
Raph Koster
Game designer, author, speaker
  • How the Wii was born

    Hours October 3, 2006 Categories Game talk
    Comments 21 Comments

    Nice article here on How the Wii was born that sounds very much like my Age of the Dinosaurs talk in some ways, and includes a lovely graph of rising costs for game development.

    Read More How the Wii was bornContinue

  • Gambling with the future

    Hours October 3, 2006October 3, 2006 Categories Game talk
    Comments 21 Comments

    For some reason, Tide’s Horizon seems to be the only MMO blog talking about the possible impact of the US ban on online gambling. But he’s right, the implications are possibly far-reaching on virtual worlds.

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  • 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your (online world)

    Hours October 2, 2006 Categories Game talk
    Comments 19 Comments

    This list of 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website has plenty that is applicable to developing online games and game communities. I won’t bother to do the translation, because in most cases it’s very obvious.

    What’s interesting is how much is different from the way online worlds do it. Is it that the Web world and the online world-world are so different? Or that we aren’t up to speed on current thinking? (After all the Web world moves at warp speed compared to the glacial pace of online world development.)

    Read More 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your (online world)Continue

  • The Sunday Song: Unicorn

    Hours October 1, 2006October 1, 2006 Categories Music, The Sunday Poem
    Comments 4 Comments

    “I used to have a unicorn.”
    It was a strange thing to say in the morning,
    But she said it anyway, talking into the pillow,
    And her voice was sad, and it caught on the words,
    Even as she caught my hand.

    http://www.raphkoster.com/music/Unicorn.mp3

    Read More “The Sunday Song: Unicorn”

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  • Ellis Paul concert

    Hours September 30, 2006September 30, 2006 Categories Music
    Comments 3 Comments

    Last night we went to see Ellis Paul at the AcousticMusicSanDiego series. Antje Duvekot was the opening act, and she also joined Ellis on stage for much of the last set.

    Ellis Paul is, bar none, one of the best songwriters in American music today. So naturally, the concert was excellent. You walked away feeling disappointed that so many great songs went unperformed — “Paris in a Day,” “Did Galileo Pray?” “Speed of Trees,” “Angel in Manhattan,” and so on… but so many great songs did get performed that you quickly realized there simply wasn’t enough time in one concert to do his catalog justice.

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  • Blog
    • Blog Home
    • Recommended posts 1998-2012
    • Recommended posts 2012-2017
    • Recommended posts, 2017-2025
  • Game Design
    • Game Design Home
    • A Theory of Fun site
    • Presentations
    • Essays
    • Interviews and panels
    • Snippets
    • Laws of Online World Design
    • The Online World Timeline
    • MMO History Links
  • Books
    • All the Books
    • Postmortems
    • Theory of Fun
    • Sunday Poems
    • Other writing
      • Fiction
      • Poetry
      • Lit Crit
  • Music
    • My Music
    • After the Flood
      • Amazon
      • iTunes
      • Spotify
    • Listen
    • Instruments and tunings
  • Art
    • Art Home
    • Pencils
    • Pen and Ink
    • Cartoons
    • Digital Art
    • Doodles
  • About Raph
    • About Me
    • CV
    • Contact Raph
    • Press kit
    • Hobbies
      • Emulation
      • Fish tanks
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