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.
Tue, 27 Feb 2001
...avatars are modes of expression, character classes are modes of expression, professions and pursuits within the game are modes of expression. So are races. Some people feel more comfortable playing a specific racial type within a game because that's the mode of expression they prefer in online games period. Rick Delashmit has been playing strong silent dumb types like trolls for as long as I have known him. That's just his mode of expression.
If your game doesn't provide some adequate mapping to a mode of expression players want, then they will not play there, because they will not feel welcome--or they will try to create said mode of expression within the game. That's why you get vampires in games that don't support it, why orcs and elves popped up in UO despite its supporting only humans, and why Atriarch (which has only newly invented alien species) will have problems. It's why Furry games are popular (Furries are easily mapped to personality traits) and why people demand a thief class in muds that clearly don't support the traditional thief class worth a damn (eg, all of them).
They're all trying to build a mask that presents what they want as their virtual self-image.
Can you map all this onto a human? Sure. We do in the real world, after all. :)
