Raph Koster's Home Page

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These are full-blown essays, papers, and articles.

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Slideshows and presentation materials from conferences.

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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.

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© 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.

Applying Bruno Bettelheim to online worlds

Forms of PLAY:

make believe (solo or cooperative), joint story-telling, fictionalizing, assisted daydreaming
less involved form of the above: social tie-building, community building & reinforcement
investigation, interaction with environment or "toy" object

Forms of GAME:

competitive measure against others or self-imposed marker threshold
cooperative form of the above (team, etc)

Under this division it is easy to see Bartle's four types falling nicely into two players (socializers and explorers) and two gamers (killers and achievers). It also helps see where folks are coming from when they say "there's no GAME in a MUSH"--defined this way, they are right. :)

This largely comes btw from Bruno Bettelheim's writings on child psychology. He also contended that this tends to be a gender division in children as well--female children like make-believe more than male, and when males engage in it, it is often solo versus group activity, etc.

On the MUD-Dev list, the habit is to refer to the "game" side of this equation as the GoP side, or "goal-oriented players."