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.
The following slides accompanied the keynote speech I gave at the inaugural Austin Game Conference in 2003.
The talk was inspired by a column of Dave Rickey's called Real Intelligence vs. Artificial Stupidity, over at Skotos. In this column, Dave makes reference to the notion that combat encounters in massively multiplayer games are essentially puzzles to be solved. I thought this was a good insight and a good way to put a concept that I had been toying with regarding cognition, and how we approach games in general.
Now, I am sure that there's complex ludological theory out there that makes my doodlings fairly insignificant--but the point was more to make these observations, which are not new, and thn extend them a bit further to try to talk (yet again) about Games As Art, about the role of games in society, and so on.
The actual talk wasn't quite as glib as the slides. If you like, please fill in the fact that I was talking about how we develop neural pathways, at least for the first half of the talk--and then later on, was talking about the social role for games and why they needn't be ashamed to sit on thee shelf with any other medium of entertainment.
Since then, the talk has developed into a book, as you can see from the little box on the upper right side of this website.
