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.
In commercial terms, one of the things to keep in mind is that there are more users than builders in the market to sell to. There are more Quake players than Quake builders, to use an example, and Quake's tools allow as-complete alteration of the Quake environment as any MUD-based system I have seen (more than virtually any template-based architecture, such as Diku-derived muds, certainly).
One thing to note is that muds themselves do a lousy job of providing these tools to the general public, in that the interfaces and tools tend to be obtuse and difficult. Since the mud community tends to be far more technically proficient than the general public, we take it in stride. Even then number of competent users of MUSHcode, LPC, and even of Diku area files is low compared to the total mudding population. But the general public will find @dig or OLC on a Diku hopelessly difficult, and it isn't suitable for a mass market product. All the major graphical systems currently in development are intended for the mass market.
(Yes, I know there are several hobbyist ventures working on this; I don't count them as major because they are in general not capable of devoting the amount of time, resources, and money to the task).
