Raph Koster

1. As the article says, "People will be willing to go along with pretty simple and pretty familiar problems as long as the feedback is great." 2. For arbitrary n x m boards, Candy Crush (and Bejeweled, it's predecessor), has been shown to be NP-complete. That means as a general class of problem, it's officially hard. This is why I said that "A lot of very good problems seem stupidly simple, but have depths to them." If you look at some of the ones I examine in this talk: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/games-are-math-10-core-… you'll see they are often what seems very simple!

> crazy juicy, so that players are captivated by spectacle, well beyond the needs of feedback from a UX perspective What a great phrase to describe an aspect of game design to strive for. https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/06/29/game-design-ux-design/

The people currently trying to track everything you do online would really love a future where they can also track all your offline physical activity and map "inside of buildings and homes and all the objects inside of them". Raph Koster predicted[1] this years ago. I hope anybody implementing this type of tech remembers that all tech is dual use. To understand the full impact of a proposed technology, Raph Koster advised[2], "Every feature must be looked at as a weapon." Promising that "...any faces and license plates captured by Aria glasses wearers will be anonymized." doesn't even begin to address the ways this technology could be used maliciously. [1] https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/06/11/how-to-build-the-scary-future-to… [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgw8RLHv1j4

My two favorite bugs that became features: 1. "true black" dyes in Ultima Online [0] 2. Skiing in the game Tribe [1] [0] https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/11/24/how-uo-rares-were-born/ [1] https://tribes.fandom.com/wiki/Skiing [*] wow, the numbering here is real confusing!

I recommend Raph Koster's latest book "Postmortems" for a digest of his experience developing Ultima Online, including some background on the ecology that never shipped. https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/

This was very cool idea and is one of the things that made me start playing. In the Official Guide book to UO you could find for each creature what it desired. From what I understand that was lifted from the database guiding the ecology system. A great source for more information on the design of UO (including some bits on the ecology system if you dig deep enough) is Raph Koster's blog: https://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-online/

One problem with digital databases: What if the electricity goes out for a very long time? Or a nefarious hacker manages to destroy the database? (Or all librarians' terminals are locked by NotPetya...) Library without catalog is, while not totally worthless, much more difficult to use. The physical card catalog, like other paper-based archives, is more resistant to attacks. For it to be destroyed, you need to cause physical damage, like a giant flood or tornado or hit it with explosives. See: https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-thre… I hope that at least the national libraries and archives will maintain physical backups for the worst-case scenarios.

http://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-online/ has a bunch of blog posts from Raph "Designer Dragon" Koster, one of the original designers of UO. It's amazing to read about how "world like" the original game was, especially compared to the direction that EQ/WoW took the genre.

Perhaps a separate list of books for "Game Designers" rather than developers would be helpful? - A Theory of Fun http://theoryoffun.com/ (Raph Koster's blog is also excellent: http://www.raphkoster.com/ ) - Level Up! http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047068867X.html - Game Design Theory http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466554207 - Game Design Workshop http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9780240809748

I disagree, as do some of the commenters: http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/05/14/the-perfect-geek-age/#comment-147… Cultural climate changes with time. And it is worth asking whether all of the changes were for the better: http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html Sometimes "nostalgia" is not an empty illusion, but is instead a longing for the days when actual progress based on original ideas was taking place. This longing can be a productive one, if it motivates you to invent, deviate from prevailing trends, and otherwise fight back against enforced mediocrity.

Raph Koster did a presentation at GDC2007 that touched on this: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdcprime2007.shtml The slides that struck me were this one: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdcprime2007/Slide61.JPG followed by this one: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdcprime2007/Slide62.JPG Note that even back then Habbo had more active monthly users than WoW. Of course Habbo and Runescape are free to play (at the basic level at least), but the costs of running them are so much smaller. Last I heard, Blizzard's WoW team numbered close to 1000 full-time staff. Jagex has a very small team that has only very recently started to expand.

If there's a bull case on FB to me it starts with the release of this Facebook Spaces beta. Spaces - or something like it - along with an eventual great set of AR glasses or contact lenses - is the end game. There's no question the long goal for corporate AR is to digitize the entire physical world, catalog it, and then sell outrageously effective ad inventory / flair against everything that we see. Using a fairly controlled VR environment as the beta case for this to get us all hooked is a huge step in the right direction and they already own the entire social graph to execute in this direction. I don't know whether I should be excited or terrified that it's FB leading this effort. They have the scale to execute, they have the technology to support the crucial relationships but they are SO FUCKING INVASIVE into our lives as a company. Raph Koster's lecture at GDC got some fairly broad attention on this concept, although his was geared more to the potential negative consequences, but it's still 100% worth a watch for anybody interested in the space. https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/03/05/slides-for-still-logged-in-my-gd…

One of the old Stratics crew here, I used to run the Ideas Den back in the day ;) And my housemate is still involved with Stratics, although not UO these days. Both of us are old Europa players, and used to have a house near the Fyde's and Barian! And the housemate was involved in the Trinsic RP scene. Feel free to drop me a line if you remember us ;) In a strange way, the community that formed around Ultima Online saved my life in more ways than one. As a hacker, there's a lot we can learn from UO's ups and downs, and especially how much emergent gameplay appeared, and how the developers reacted. Clean Up Britannia being a great case in point, along with Trammel. And from a pure tech point of view... what the hell was with the low latency of the old 2D client? For some reason it always offered a better connection than any of the multiple attempts to re-write it. That in turn resulted in the community sticking to said 2D client, and the developers cancelling the first '3D' client (still fixed isometric, just 3D rendered). What's fascinating is some of the directions it didn't go in - back before the Kingdom Reborn client was developed, there apparently was a Warcraft 3 style engine under development. When it comes to game design, Raph Koster is one of the people who literally wrote the (a) book on the subject, having started out in MUDs and then being hired for UO. His blog is extremely worth reading, and if you have any interest into the history of UO's game design,…

Well, I said aspired to. They had ambitions that eventually got walked back to more basic behaviors. Here's an article from Raph Koster on it: https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/

I remember when Raph was working on Metaplace[1], which was a kid-targeting, programmable (Lua dialect), virtual world/user generated content factory that was contemporary to the launch of Roblox ca. 2006-2007. I wonder quite often what things might be like if Metaplace had gotten to the scale and scope that Roblox wound up achieving. 1: https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/09/18/metaplace/, or this demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZiB_JcRH_s, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace

I’m glad you enjoyed it, though I personally really only contributed shared code - SOE ended up using my UI library from Planetside across all their titles at the time. From where I sat (St Louis, then San Diego), it looked like the SWG team (Austin) worked incredibly hard on the title, and explored ideas that were really groundbreaking for the time. The Star Wars universe is a hard one to make into an MMO - the way Jedi work in the universe combined with what players want for themselves is very hard to solve for. I recall Raph wrote about it, maybe more than once. https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/16/a-jedi-saga/

Raph Koster claims parallel invention of the term "shard" for separate worlds in MMOs. https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-uo/

The first link in the article [1], to a blogpost about the etymology of the definition of "shard" that we now think of as the primary meaning of the word, is super interesting. The release of Ultima Online doesn't really seem too close to any inflection point of the word on Google Ngram, but I'm not sure exactly how close we should expect it to be to 1980 or 2000. 1. https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-uo/

A lot of the criticism seems to be around the exact number which indeed seems to vary based on the strength of connections and other factors. Some discussion here: https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/02/27/dunbars-number-matters-online-to… Obviously the dynamic of employees at a company (mostly) differ from a hunter-gatherer tribe or from an online gaming or other community.

Raph Koster, for one. https://www.raphkoster.com/2021/09/02/online-world-or-metaverse/

Raph Koster had a lot to do with both Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. In some ways he's as influential as Lord British in this space. https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/postmortems/ He has a book called Postmortems where he compiled essays (many found on his web page) about his early days writing MUDs and developing fantasy worlds, including UO and SWG.

Better technology for gaming has simply raised the bar for how high game production values can become: https://www.raphkoster.com/2018/01/17/the-cost-of-games/

https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-uo/ Nice article from Raph Koster. Especially if you played Ultima Online by any chance.

UO server would crash because the player's mount could wander around inside their inventory: https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/08/16/random-uo-anecdote-2/

Very touching story. I'm remembering one of the first touching stories of an influential MMORPG gamer disappearing because of her dead: A story known as "A Story About a Tree": https://www.raphkoster.com/games/essays/a-story-about-a-tree/

Raph Koster cites MUDs (including Dartmud) as inspiration for Ultima Online [1]. UO as it existed around the T2A / Renaissance era was, in many ways, a lot closer in design to MUDs than it was to modern MMORPGs. [1] https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/10/31/emmerts-serious-games-keynote/

Economies are hard, as are game economies: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/the-evolution-of-uos-economy…

Since the page doesn't really call out who's speaking, the presenter is Raph Koster, who has a long history designing online games (including Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies) and writing about game design theory. https://www.raphkoster.com/about-raph/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster

Wikipedia and Ralph Koster seem to agree. "The word "shard" in a database context may be derived from the 1997 MMORPG Ultima Online, which referred to its game servers and their associated databases as "shards." This was in reference to the game's fiction, in which the broken shards of the evil wizard Mondain's Gem of Immortality each contained a complete, living copy of the world.[24] This usage spread informally through the video game industry, and may have come into mainstream usage via Flickr, which began as a tool for an unpublished MMO." Original blog post: http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-uo/

Well, the long form answer is linking this post and that post: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/02/10/are-single-player-games-doomed/ http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/02/15/have-single-player-games-ever-exi…