Raph Koster's Home Page

Hyper PS2 interview

I met Masaya Matsuura, of Parappa the Rapper fame, at GDC 2005, when we were co-presenters of the First Penguin Award to Richard Bartle. We kept in touch, trading music and games, and he did the Japanese foreword for my book. He also did this little interview for Hyper PS2, a Japanese Playstation magazine.

Please explain briefly your current position and your career.

I am currently the Chief Creative Officer for Sony Online Entertainment. I started out in the industry as a designer and eventually lead designer for Ultima Online, back in 1995. I was the creative director for Star Wars Galaxies for SOE, and then about two years ago I became CCO. This year will mark my tenth year as a professional game designer. I originally studied to be a writer, but online games turned out to be my career.

One of your most famous games from SOE is "EverQuest". Please give a general overview for the history of this game and how you were involved to this project.

I cannot take any credit for Everquest. The project was started long before I joined Sony. It was the second really big success in online worlds in the US, after Ultima Online, and was at that time a competitor to the game I was working on!

I joined Sony Online after leaving EA. EverQuest was still going strong, as it is today. I was slightly involved with EverQuest II, but really, the credit for that game belongs to the EQ2 game team.

Please tell me number of world wide players of EverQuest, and distribution condition. (ex.USA 400,000,KOREA1000,000 etc...)

As a whole, Sony Online has nearly 800,000 total players in its online games worldwide. Most of them are in the US and Europe. Everquest alone represents over 275,000 of those.

I don't know exactly about this so please forgive me if some of what I'm saying is incorrect, I heard that at first SOE was negative about the items are being actually sold online (MUD) but now it's officially supported. Could you tell me about this process, current situation and future possibilities?

Our concern has always been the integrity of the game. Many folks try to profit from online games by selling virtual items, and in the process, a lot of players were cheated, lost their accounts or their items, and a lot of customer service calls were generated. In the end, we concluded that the right thing to do was to provide an officially sanctioned way to trade the rights to use items, characters and coin between players for real money, so that we can make sure that everything happens fairly.

We recently announced "Station Exchange," which is this trading mechanism. At first, it will be deployed to Everquest II, and only to new servers, so that players can make a choice about whether or not they want to participate.

Please tell me about your child hood. Are there any interesting events from your childhood/ earlier years that influenced your career path?

I was fortunate as a child to grow up in many different places, because my mother worked for UNICEF. By the time I entered college, I had lived in four different countries, sometimes during times of political upheaval. I think this has given me a keen interest in making games that bring communities together, that help people see other points of view. I see that as one of the great missions that online games can fulfill.

What made you start working in game industry?

It was almost accidental! I was in graduate school, and my wife and I were both making text-based online games (MUDs) as a hobby. The mud we worked on, which is still running at http://www.legendmud.org, was very well-received and got a lot of attention. The result was that when the commercial graphical online worlds started to be developed, we were recruited by a couple of different companies. I had to pick between working on Meridian 59 and Ultima Online, and I chose Ultima.

I never expected to be a game designer for a profession. I started designing board games and computer games when I was ten or eleven, on the Atari 8-bit computers, but I had drifted away from it until I finished college. I thought I was going to be a writer or teacher.

I heard you're using your original guitar song that you played in preproduction of game productions. Don't you have an ambition that you want to complete with them?

I feel very blessed to have several talents that I can pursue--but at the same time it is a bit of a curse. It can be hard to focus on just one of them and develop it to a point where you can really feel proud of what you accomplish. In the case of music, I studied it during my college years, and I have been playing acoustic guitar for around 15 years now. I have even recorded one CD. But I don't have time to play gigs or devote more time to songwriting.

It is something that gives me great personal satisfaction, and I think I am pretty good. But the time will have to be right for me to do more with it.

I read your book?"Theory of Fun" in the States. I heard it will be also published in Japan. Could you give a small introduction about your book?

Basically, it's a book about what fun is and why games are important. It tries to examine what are the mental processes that go on when we call something "fun," and it looks at what elements of games make something fun or not. Then it goes on to examine the potential for games as a medium--whether they can be as rich a medium as movies, or books, or comics, or music--and to try to put games in context with the rest of human culture.

I like to say that it's the book that you give to people who don't understand games or gamers. It explains why we shouldn't be ashamed of games, even when our parents don't understand!

Do you think cognitive scientific point of view is becoming important in field of game and IT? If so, which cognitive scientific point of view interests you now? ?

It is becoming more important in practically every field. Just the other day I read an article by a sound engineer who had analyzed the frequency distributions of hit songs, and had found that there were consistent patterns to what sonic landscapes made for enduring hits. That's an example of practical cognition theory at work.

I wouldn't say that right now I have any particular point of view that I am wedded to. It seems like the science changes every day. What does seem clear is that we are learning more and more about how the brain works, about ways in which creators of media will be able to directly push the buttons of consumers, and about ways in which we can maybe even get around some of our limitations.

I'm reading "User illusion/ Tor Norretranders" that you recommended. Now I'm reading about the death of Alan Turing and if it was suicide or not. Have you read any of the books I recommended to you?

I have to confess that I bought the books by Steven Pinker than you recommended, but I haven't started reading them yet! I have a backlog of 30 books on my bookshelf.

You may have played some of our games. If you have any opinion, please tell me!

Not all of your games are available in the US, unfortunately. I of course played Parappa when it came out, and it was a huge hit in my family. You did me the favor of sending me VibRibbon. I loved VibRibbon. I thought that the visual style was interesting and distinctive, the music was very entertaining, and the game design itself accomplished the difficult trick of being very simple to learn and difficult to master. From a design perspective, if Parappa was about hitting single notes, VibRibbon becomes about chords as you have to hit multiple notes at once.

I think San Diego is a fantastic place! I imagine you're making games in the most fantastic studio in the world. Could you explain your company and game studios with pictures and captions?

Well, I can try!

Several photos were attached and printed in the magazine to answer the above question; in particular there's this one of Matsuura-san and his assistant Akiko Ogawa both listening to the tinny speakers on my laptop as they playback one of my guitar pieces.

In addition to the interview proper, I was asked to provide my personal message to Japanese game players and readers. The quote I sent was:

Never forget to be content with your lives,
but never satisfied that this is all you can achieve.
If you are discontent, your achievements will not matter,
and if you are satisfied, you will never achieve more.