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.
These are taken from both experience and from the writings of others. Most are the sort of "Duh" things that many who have done this sort of game design take for granted, but others may be less intuitive. Many of the laws here were actually stated as such by others, and not by me.
A Caveat
Ola's Law About Laws
Any general law about virtual worlds should be read as a challenge rather
than as a guideline. You'll learn more from attacking it than from
accepting it.
Design Rules
The secrets to a really long-lived, goal-oriented, online game of wide appeal
Modes of expression
You're trying to provide as many modes of expression as possible in your online
world. Character classes are just modes of expression, after all.
Persistence means it never goes away
Once you open your online world, expect to keep your team on it indefinitely.
Some of these games have never closed. And closing one prematurely
may result in losing the faith of your customers, damaging the prospects for
other games in the same genre.
Macroing, botting, and automation
No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing
your world.
Corollary:
Looking at what parts of your game players tend to automate is a good way to
determine which parts of the game are tedious and/or not fun.
Game systems
No matter what you do, players will decode every formula, statictic, and
algorithm in your world via experimentation.
It is always more rewarding to kill other players than to kill whatever
the game sets up as a target.
A given player of level x can slay multiple creatures of level
y. Therefore, killing a player of level x yields ny
reward in purely in-game reward terms. Players will therefore always be more
rewarding in game terms than monsters of comparable difficulty. However,
there's also the fact that players will be more challenging and exciting to
fight than monsters no matter what you do.
Never trust the client.
Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the
enemy. Never ever ever forget this.
J. C. Lawrence's "do it everywhere" law
If you do it one place, you have to do it everywhere. Players like clever
things and will search them out. Once they find a clever thing they will
search for other similar or related clever things that seem to be implied by
what they found and will get pissed off if they don't find them.
Hyrup's "do it everywhere" Corollary
The more detailed you make the world, the more players will want to break away
from the classical molds.
Dr Cat's Stamp Collecting Dilemma
"Lots of people might like stamp collecting in your virtual world. But those
who do will never play with those who like other features. Should you have
stamp collecting in your world?" We know that there are a wide range of
features that people find enjoyable in online worlds. We also know that some
of these features are in conflict with one another. Given the above, we
don't yet know if it is possible to have a successful world that
incorporates all the features, or whether the design must choose to exclude
some of them in order to keep the players happy.
Koster's Law (Mike Sellers was actually the one to dub it thus)
The quality of roleplaying is inversely proportional to the number of
people playing.
Hyrup's Counter-observation
The higher the fee, the better the roleplayers. (And of course, the smaller
the playerbase.)
Enforcing roleplaying
A roleplay-mandated world is essentially going to have to be a fascist state.
Whether or not this accords with your goals in making such a world is a
decision you yourself will have to make.
Storytelling versus simulation
If you write a static story (or indeed include any static element) in
your game, everyone in the world will know how it ends in a matter of days.
Mathematically, it is not possible for a design team to create stories fast
enough to supply everyone playing. This is the traditional approach to this
sort of game nonetheless. You can try a sim-style game which doesn't supply
stories but instead supplies freedom to make them. This is a lot harder
and arguably has never been done successfully.
Players have higher expectations of the virtual world
The expectations are higher than of similar actions in the real world. For
example: players will expect all labor to result in profit; they will expect
life to be fair; they will expect to be protected from aggression before the
fact, and not just to seek redress after the fact; they will expect problems
to be resolved quickly; they will expect that their integrity will be assumed
to be beyond reproach; in other words, they will expect too much, and you will
not be able to supply it all. The trick is to manage the expectations.
Online game economies are hard
A faucet->drain economy is one where you spawn new stuff, let it pool in the
"sink" that is the game, and then have a concomitant drain. Players will
hate having this drain, but if you do not enforce ongoing expenditures,
you will have Monty Haul syndrome, infinite accumulation of wealth, overall
rise in the "standard of living" and capabilities of the average player, and
thus unbalance in the game design and poor game longevity.
Ownership is key
You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game. This is what will
make them stay--it is a "barrier to departure." Social bonds are not
enough, because good social bonds extend outside the game. Instead, it is
context. If they can build their own buildings, build a character, own
possessions, hold down a job, feel a sense of responsibility to something that
cannot be removed from the game--then you have ownership.
If your game is narrow, it will fail
Your game design must be expansive. Even the coolest game mechanic becomes
tiresome after a time. You have to supply alternate ways of playing, or
alternate ways of experiencing the world. Otherwise, the players will go to
another world where they can have new experiences. This means new additions,
or better yet, completely different subgames embedded in the actual game.
Lambert's Laws:
Featuritis
No matter how many new features you have or add, the players will always want
more.
Pleasing your Players
Despite your best intentions, any change will be looked upon as a bad change
to a large percentage of your players. Even those who forgot they asked for
it to begin with.
Hyrup's Loophole Law
If something can be abused, it will be.
Murphy's Law
Servers only crash and don't restart when you go out of town.
Dr Cat's Theorem
Attention is the currency of the future.
Dr Cat's Theorem as expressed by J C Lawrence
The basic medium of multiplayer games is communication.
Hanarra's Laws
Elmqvist's Law
In an online game, players find it rewarding to save the world. They find it
more rewarding to save the world together, with lots of other
people.
A corollary to Elmqvist's Law
In general, adding features to an online game that prevent people from
playing together is a bad idea.
A caveat to the corollary to Elmqvist's Law
The exception would be features that enhance the sense of identity of groups
of players, such as player languages.
Baron's Design Dichotomy
According to Jonathan Baron, there are two kinds of online games: Achievement
Oriented, and Cumulative Character. In the former, the players who "win" do so
because they they are the best at whatever the game offers. Their glory is
achieved by shaming other players. In the latter, anyone can reach the
pinnacle of achievement by mere persistence; the game is driven by sheer
unadulterated capitalism.
Online identity
We spend a lot of time making people able to have a very strong personal
identity in our worlds (letting them define themselves in great detail, down
to eye color). But identity is portable. How many of you have been
playing the same character in RPGs for 15 years, like me? You cannot count on
a sense of identity, of character building, to keep someone in your game.
In game calendars
It's nice to have an in-game calendar. But emotional resonances will never
accrue to in-game holidays. The only calendar that really matters is the real
world one. Don't worry about breaking fiction--online games are about social
interaction, not about fictional consistency.
Social Laws
Koster's Theorem
Virtual social bonds evolve from the fictional towards real social bonds.
If you have good community ties, they will be out-of-character ties, not
in-character ties. In other words, friendships will migrate right out of
your world into email, real-life gatherings, etc.
Baron's Theorem
Hate is good. This is because conflict drives the formation of social
bonds and thus of communities. It is an engine that brings players closer
together.
Baron's Law
Glory is the reason why people play online; shame is what keeps them from
playing online. Neither is possible without other people being present.
Mike Sellers' Hypothesis
"The more persistence a game tries to have; the longer it is set up to last;
the greater number (and broader variety) of people it tries to attract; and in
general the more immersive a game/world it set out to be--then the more
breadth and depth of human experience it needs to support to be successful for
more than say, 12-24 months. If you try to create a deeply immersive, broadly
appealing, long-lasting world that does not adequately provide for human
tendencies such as violence, acquisition, justice, family, community,
exploration, etc (and I would contend we are nowhere close to doing this), you
will see two results: first, individuals in the population will begin to
display a wide range of fairly predictable socially pathological behaviors
(including general malaise, complaining, excessive bullying and/or PKing,
harassment, territoriality, inappropriate aggression, and open rebellion
against those who run the game); and second, people will eventually vote with
their feet--but only after having passionately cast 'a pox on both your
houses.' In essence, if you set people up for an experience they deeply crave
(and mostly cannot find in real life) and then don't deliver, they will become
like spurned lovers--somebecome sullen and aggressive or neurotic, and
eventually almost all leave."
Schubert's Law of Player Expectations
A new player's expectations of a virtual world are driven by his expectations
of single-player games. In particular, he expects a narrow, predictable
plotline with well-defined quests and a carefully sculpted for himself as the
hero. He also expects no interference or disruption from other players. These
are difficult, and sometimes impossible, expectations for a virtual world to
actually meet.
Violence is inevitable
You're going to have violence done to people no matter what the facilities
for it in the game are. It may be combat system, stealing, blocking
entrances, trapping monsters,stealing kills to get experience, pestering,
harassment, verbal violence, or just rudeness.
Is it a game?
It's a SERVICE. Not a game. It's a WORLD. Not a game. It's a COMMUNITY.
Not a game. Anyone who says, "it's just a game" is missing the point.
Identity
You will NEVER have a solid unique identity for your problematic players.
They essentially have complete anonymity because of the Internet. Even
addresses, credit cards, and so on can be faked--and will be.
Jeff Kesselman's Theorem
A MUD universe is all about psychology.
After all, there IS no physicality. It's all psych and group dynamics.
Psychological disinhibition
People act like jerks more easily online, because anonymity is intoxicating.
It is easier to objectify other people and therefore to treat them badly. The
only way to combat this is to get them to empathize more with other players.
Mass market facts
Disturbing for those used to smaller environments, but: administrative
problems increase EXPONENTIALLY instead of linearly, as your playerbase digs
deeper into the mass market. Traditional approaches tend to start to fail.
Your playerbase probably isn't ready or willing to police itself.
Anonymity and in-game admins
The in-game admin faces a bizarre problem. He is exercising power that the
ordinary virtual citizen cannot. And he is looked to in many ways to provide a
certain atmosphere and level of civility in the environment. Yet the fact
remains that no matter how scrupulously honest he is, no matter how just he
shows himself to be, no matter how committed to the welfare of the virtual
space he may prove himself, people will hate his guts. They will mistrust him
precisely because he has power, and they can never know him. There will be
false accusations galore, many insinuations of nefarious motives, and former
friends will turn against him. It may be that the old saying about power and
absolute power is just too ingrained in the psyche of most people; whatever
the reasons, there has never been an online game whose admins could say with a
straight face that all their players really trusted them (and by the way, it
gets worse once you take money!).
Community size
Ideal community size is no larger than 250. Past that, you really get
subcommunities.
Hans Henrik Staerfeldt's Law of Player/Admin Relations:
The amount of whining players do is positively proportional to how
much you pamper them.
Many players whine if they see any kind of bonus in it for them.
It will simply be another way for them to achieve their goals.
As an admin you hold the key to many of the goals that they have
concerning the virtual environment you control. If you do not
pamper the players and let them know that whining will not help
them, the whining will subside.
Hal Black's Elaboration
The more responsive an admin is to user feedback of a given type,
the more of that type the admin will get. Specifically, as an admin
implements features from user suggestions, the more ideas for features
will be submitted. Likewise, the more an admin coddles whiners, the
more whining will ensue.
J C Lawrence's "stating the obvious" law
The more people you get, the more versions of "what we're really doing" you're
going to get.
John Hanke's Law (cited by Mike Sellers)
In every aggregation of people online, there is an irreducible proportion of
... jerks (he used a different word :-)
Rewarding players
It is not possible to run a scenario or award player actions without
other players crying favoritism.
Rewards
The longer your game runs, the less often you get kudos for your efforts.
Dundee's Law
Fighting the battle for nomenclature with your players is a futile act.
Whatever they want to call things is what they will be called.
Ananda Dawnsinger's Law
The less disruption that
occurs in a community, the less able the community is able to deal
with disruption when it does occur.
Rickey's Law
People don't want "A story". They want *their* story.
Socialization requires downtime
Whatever the rewarded activity in your game is, it has to give people time to
breathe if you want them to socialize.
Darklock's First Law
Cheating is an apparently advantageous violation of player assumptions about
the game. When those assumptions are satisfied, all apparently advantageous
methods are fair. When they are violated, no apparently advantageous methods
are fair. "Using exterior means to influence the play of a game is not
necessarily cheating. It is only cheating if it violates the assumptions of
other players *and* provides an advantage. When a player expects that gaining
levels in a game takes a long period of time, he will call any method of
gaining them rapidly "cheating" -- even if it is an intentional feature of the
game. When he expects that gaining levels is a rapid process, however, he will
not think the people gaining them slowly are cheating... because that is not
an apparently advantageous situation. It does not matter whether this actually
*is* an advantageous situation, only whether it *appears* advantageous."
Corollary to Darklock's First Law
A bug is an apparently *disadvantageous* violation of player assumptions about
the game. "This may be viewed as a specific application of Dundee's Law,
"Fighting the battle for nomenclature with your players is a futile act.
Whatever they want to call things is what they will be called." It does not
matter whether "cheating" or a "bug" was an intentional part of the game
design; it only matters whether the players *assumed* they were
intentional."
Darklock's Second Law
Any violation of player assumptions is bad. "This follows from the first law
because allowing violation of player assumptions is -- pathologically -- a
unilateral "license to cheat". When you license any player to violate the
assumptions of others, you imply a right for ALL players to violate the
assumptions of others, and they will attempt to do so in an apparently
advantageous fashion. This turns your playerbase into a society of cheaters,
under the umbrella of truths we hold to be self-evident. (Which is, of course,
a "slippery slope" argument. It does not logically follow that *any* such
playerbase MUST degenerate into a society of cheaters; only that human nature
and psychology make some degree of such degeneration likely. Your mileage, as
they say, may vary.)"
J C Lawrence on Utopias
Don't strive for perfection, strive for expressive fertility. You can't
create utopia, and if you did nobody would want to live there.
Who contributed (purposely or inadvertently!), sorted alphabetically:
