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.
An exchange with Dave Rickey, now of Dark Age of Camelot.
Sun, 22 Jul 2001
To me, [saying that online worlds are not a dramatic medium, but a form of escapism] carries with it assumptions as well. I don't see those two statements as necessarily being in contradiction. Is the written word not both a form of escapism and also a dramatic medium (and a communications medium, and several other things to boot)?
It seems undeniable to me that there is significant potential for online worlds as a dramatic medium, just as it is patent that it is a form of escapism. It's clearly a medium of communication, of course.
...All new media begin [caught up in the symbolism and techniques of other media]. Theater started with the underpinnings of verse, film with theater, the novel with the letter and the modern notion of song with the news report. Some concepts translate, and some do not (we don't see nearly as many topical songs, epistolary novels, plays in verse, or stagey films as we used to).
Some concepts translate pretty well. Symbolism, as an example, strikes me as thoroughly bizarre [to attempt to exclude from muds]. We live lives rife with symbolism, and I'd be hard-pressed to imagine a medium that does not make use of it in one way or another, even ones devoted mostly to dryly factual content. I don't think that as a medium online games have yet made good conscious use of symbolism in ways that do not borrow liberally, though there are some neat ones in common usage (the Void, as used by many Dikus, is a great example).
[In saying that people want to escape not just into the strange and different, but also into strange difference that makes them happier] I believe you are carrying with you the baggage of a very particular approach to online world design, one perhaps inevitable given the preponderance of entertainment uses of the medium when compared to other uses. There are many other applications for online worlds beyond the game. It may well be (and I tend to believe this personally) that going forward, the most prominent use of the online world is as an escapist entertainment, but that does not mean that such is what online worlds are for.
Can escapist, wish-fulfilling forms of entertainment not also inform, educate, and challenge? Of course they can, and they often do. Granted, the most common theme is the very Apollonian affirmation of custom, but there's a wealth more even in heavily conformist and thematically conservative mass media forms of escape such as TV and the Hollywood film. Online worlds could be put to many uses, they just haven't been yet.
Online worlds are most successful when they manage to make you forget about the technological crutches and impedimenta that got you into the shared world in the first place. Books are most successful when they make you forget you're reading, movies when they make you forget the seat and the sticky floor, music when you lose track of your body.
But I suspect you're talking about something else. In SF, the term for suspension of disbelief came about because of the need to get the reader to accept the wacky, wonderful, bizarre, and speculative. You seem to be arguing that in online games, the subtle tricks (my favorite term related to this is the verb "to heinlein," as in "you heinleined that into the story really well"--the casual reference to advance technology presented so matter-of-factly and unremarkably that the reader accepts it. The sui generis example being Heinlein's own "The door irised open.") are unnecessary simply because the the environment is interactive and the other participants are real.
Yet live action roleplaying, improvisational theater, and the murder mystery party game have all had to build up a repertoire of tricks too, despite the environment being interactive and the other participants being real. I suspect you'll argue that they do not present an alternate world in which the action takes place, and this is true. Yet the mere fact that it is an alternate world seen through a screen means that there's substantial reason to need tricks, and we work assiduously on them all the time: cleaner interfaces, better expressivity for the avatars, more realistic worlds, etc.
[Despite the fact that these games are most successful when reflecting what is important to the players], it seems that most often, what's important to players is the game's reaction to their actions. The feedback loops, the "ding," the level up and the new skills. Perhaps what is most insidious about this fact is the way in which it undermines the presence of others in the game; one works with others for the game's approbation, not for the approval of one's peers. There's no reward mechanism established right now in the genre for "interacting with others" which is the key differential between online worlds and single-player ones. One might argue that until players shift their attention from the game/world's reactions to the reactions of others in the environment, that we're still in silent single camera movie days.
Currently, the mechanisms of approval by others, of friendship, of emotion aroused by human contact, are still second-order effects in online games. The primary mechanisms are still that of recognition by the system.
It may be that until we jettison the trappings of roleplaying games, which enforce those mechanisms, online worlds cannot evolve. Yet despite many attempts going back to 1989, we seem to have real trouble doing so.
Empowerment is often seen as the cheapest, easiest target to hit in entertainment and art. Are [we] aiming too low?
"Virtual Tourism" will succeed only to the degree that it allows
the player to be someone of
consequence in that context. A
simple walking tour of Rennaissance Italy or the Ch'in Dynasty
Middle Kingdom, realistic or not, does not do that any more than a
documentary of the same setting, but being minor nobility in the
same contexts would. - Dave Rickey
Being minor nobility in those contexts is also a far more educational experience than a documentary could ever be. If all you get out of it at the end is a virtual execution and an acute understanding of the limitations of a given role in that society, do you deem that experience a failure? (It may well not have commercial viability, but neither does lots of other valuable stuff).
