Postmortems: Selected Essays Volume One

By Raph Koster and Richard Garriott de Cayeux

Few game designers have shared as many lessons learned as Raph Koster. In a quarter-century of writings and talks, he has offered up game design lessons, online community theories, and candid self-evaluation.

This first volume of a three-book set of selected essays collects previously written postmortems and many brand new pieces. They are

• Language: English
• Publisher: Altered Tuning Press
• Release date: Jun 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780996793735

Raph Koster

Raph Koster is a veteran game designer who has been professionally credited in almost every area of the game industry. He's been the lead designer and director of massive titles such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies; and he's contributed writing, art, soundtrack music, and programming to many more titles ranging from Facebook games to single-player titles for handheld consoles. He has worked as a creative executive at Sony Online and Disney Playdom, and in 2012 was honored as an Online Game Legend at the Game Developers Conference Online.

Book preview

Contents

Also by Raph Koster

Foreword

Dedication

Introduction

Early days

In Peru

Una carrera

My first game

MUDs

What is a MUD?

What is a Diku?

Announcing LegendMUD

A brief history of LegendMUD

LegendMUD

Scripting Languages in Diku MUDs

LegendMUD scripting examples

Beowulf

1950s and what a MUD could be

Moods

AFK chat

Living with playerkilling

Fumbling around with bad behavior

An Open Forum on the Future of LegendMud

New Immortal Structure

Player Code of Conduct

Immort Code of Conduct

MUD Influence

Leaving Legend

Alright guys!

Ultima Online

Ultima Online is Fifteen

Random UO Anecdote

Origin Culture

The Technology Stack

Sharding Came from UO?

The Ultima Online Resource System

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

How UO Rares Were Born

Use-based systems

The evolution of UO’s economy

Selling virtual property for real world money

Random UO Anecdote #2

Notes on Making of UO articles

The UO essays

A Story About A Tree

Revisiting the Garden of Remembrance

What Rough Beast?

Who Are These People Anyway?

So Let’s Get Practical

The Man Behind the Curtain

A Community Cookbook

A brief history of murder

The safe world, or Why say leave out combat? Let’s Just Leave It In

Storytelling in the online space

Two models for Narrative Worlds

Why Don’t Our NPCs?

Is it a game or is it a world?

Is the future in smaller muds?

Postmortem

UO’s influence

The End of the World

Privateer Online

Star Settlers

Privateer Online

Star Wars Galaxies

Comments from the Team letter

SciFi MMPs: Lessons learned

Talking to the players

SWG Design Process

MMO Design and Satisfying a Diverse Playerbase

What is the game ABOUT?

Balance and More: Making Economics, High Level Content, and Advancement Work

A Philosophical Statement on Playerkilling

Socialization and Convenience

Astromech Stats: Economy Stats

Forcing Interaction

Dynamic POIs

The Arts in MMOs

Hairdressing!

Treating Players Like Numbers

Do auction houses suck?

Jared Diamond applied to virtual worlds

Should we pursue balance?

Mailbag: Action Combat

The SWG postmortem series

Temporary Enemy Flagging

A Jedi Saga

SWG’s Dynamic World

Designing a Living Society in SWG

The social glue

Did Star Wars Galaxies Fail?

The NGE and Community Building

SWG is shutting down

The End of a Galaxy

Transitions

HOOWAH! Player memorabilia

Speech at SyndCon 2010

Andean Bird

A Vague Game Idea

PKing Duck: More on the Vague Game Idea

Vague game less vague

Andean Bird

Influences

Metaplace

Metaplace

A MetaHistory

Original Metaplace one-sheets

Where did the Metaplace idea come from?

Reinventing MMOs

Life on Metaplace

Connecting to the wider world

Some Zone Design Lessons

The Great Meep-In

Metaplace Game Jam Postmortem

The Golden Egg

Why Isn’t Money Points?

Metaplace Postmortem

Closing

Social games

Are Virtual Worlds Over?

The My Vineyard story

Conclusion

About the Author

Notes

Postmortems

Selected Essays Volume One

by Raph Koster

ALTERED TUNING PRESS

Ultima Online® is a registered trademark of Electronic Arts Inc.

Star Wars Galaxies® is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd.

All original material is © 2017 by Raphael Koster. All rights reserved.

Published by Altered Tuning Press

12463 Rancho Bernardo Rd., #556

San Diego, CA 92128

ISBN-13: 978-0-9967937-3-5

ISBN: 0-9967937-3-9

Postmortems

Selected Essays Volume One

by Raph Koster

Also by Raph Koster

Books

A Theory of Fun for Game Design

Sunday Poems

Music

After the Flood

Foreword

The art form of computer games remains, I would argue, in its infancy... We are about 40 years in, and computer games have already grown to have more economic and arguably more social impact, than the industries of film, television, books, and other physical art forms combined, many times over. Yet, I say it’s in its infancy, because so much about this art form is changing, so fast, that the art form has rarely stabilized into standards that can be observed and documented, much less built upon.

These days most all games are online in some way. Most games are downloaded, while only a few years ago, most games were purchased at a retail store. Multiplayer games are now common, and one of the best selling categories of games available. While this multiplayer dominance is a relatively recent phenomenon, multiplayer games go way, way back.

For about as long as there have been people using computers, people have been networking them together. Well before we published the Hall of Fame game Ultima Online, often credited as the first true Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), computer systems from PLATO to dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were allowing people to play together online.

These early forays into online gaming may not have had the audiovisual bells and whistles that help sell the Triple A games of today, but they explored and refined techniques that are now being exploited and improved on by creators across the industry.

For years before Origin embarked on creating what would become the watershed Ultima Online, we watched the nascent evolution of early multiplayer games from text MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) to graphical MUDs. We watched the development of head-to-head battle environments like Kesmai's Air Warrior. Yet year after year we waited, until near the end of the 1990’s we saw the emergence of the World Wide Web and we knew this was the moment that everyone would soon be online, and finally truly massively multiplayer games would be possible.

Since no game of this style at this scale had been attempted, we sought out the expertise that existed before us. Raph Koster joined the founding Ultima Online team as its lead designer. He brought with him his years of experience in text MUDs, as we then all ran headlong into the future together.

MMORPG’s are hard to make. They are basically Ernest Cline’s Oasis from Ready Player One, with the state-of-the-art reality crafting that can be done with the day's technology. Crafting an alternate reality goes far beyond just the physics of a simulated world. Why are players there, what will keep bringing them back? What are the rules of interpersonal sharing of the experience, what can I do alone, when must I get help from another? How safe must the world be, or when could I backstab my partners, for fun or profit? All these aspects were new to me, new to the scale of product we were attempting, but not new to Raph.

Raph Koster is one of the few who not only lived through this period, but helped define how it grew. More importantly, he is one of the even fewer to create records of this evolution that should not just be of interest to any hoping to understand our medium, but to those who help to guide its future. I trust the readers of this book will grow in the knowledge, understanding and ability to work within and help advance the industry, just as I felt from spending years developing games with Raph Koster.

Richard Lord British Garriott

Creator of the Ultima Series and the recent Shroud of the Avatar

Dedication

This is dedicated to those builders of worlds whom I worked alongside, and who are no longer with us.

Ultima Online

Brett Bonner

Matt Crump

Chuck Lupher

Teresa Potts

Joe Rabbitt

John Watson

Origin

Donavon Keithley

Teresa Maxwell

Brian Smith

Clay Towery

Paul Steed

Privateer Online

Pete Shelus

Star Wars Galaxies

Jeff Freeman

Ben Hanson

Wesley Haselden

Andy Lamp

Ethan Nason

David Nevala

John Roy

Sony Online

Rick Johnson

Steve Pierce

Edwin Roselle

Nathan Temple

John Tessin

Metaplace

Joe Skivolocke

Adam Smith

* * *

Introduction

This isn’t a memoir.

It may perhaps edge into that at times; it’s hard not to start telling fun stories, once you are reminiscing! And I’m sure there are some who might be disappointed that this isn’t a tell-all.¹

This book strives to be what the title says: a collection of self-evaluative writings and lessons learned. It therefore has a hefty dose of history, but it’s oriented around design, not salacious or behind-the-scenes tidbits. Oh, there are a few anecdotes here and there, but this book is intended to be something useful to working game designers and historians, and interesting to players of the various games discussed. With any luck, some of the lessons will be applicable to people working on any sort of connected online community.

When I started making online worlds, I sought out lessons from those who had done it before me: The Lessons of LucasFilm’s "Habitat,"² the (at the time, new) paper by Dr. Richard Bartle entitled Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who Suit MUDs.³ There wasn’t very much out there, but I did find an active community discussing how to push the state of the art forward, first on Usenet’s⁴ rec.games.mud.diku⁵ and later on the fabled MUD-Dev⁶ mailing list run by J. C. Lawrence, in journals such as Imaginary Realities,⁷ and amongst the early scholars who were exploring the possibilities in MUDs, MUSHes, and MOOs.

I took that as a model. I strive to do my learning in public.

I’ve now been making games professionally for over twenty years, and I’ve been writing on my website for a very long time. The first writings there were put up sometime around 1996. I was actively posting on Usenet newsgroups and on the MUD-Dev mailing list in the mid-1990s. I’ve also made a lot of silly, often arrogant mistakes; had some successes; and along the way, tried to be honest with myself and others about both.

That’s what this book is. There are writings in here that I cringe to read. Administrative practices that make me shudder, idealism that causes a wince, and design errors so glaring that I can’t believe I missed them. But there are also a lot of hard-won learnings.

I’ve written far more about online game design than would fit in one book of this size; in fact, I’m working on a second collection like this one, that collects just the additional materials on virtual worlds ranging from MUDs to augmented reality games played on top of the real world, writings that aren’t specifically about one world. After that, with any luck, will come another just related to general game design topics. But in the meantime, Postmortems focuses on specifically articles about games I led in some fashion. Some of them didn’t even reach the public.

There aren’t articles for every game I’ve worked on. Some games simply have more stuff to talk about. Some games have interesting design lessons, and others just have the sort of behind-the-scenes trivia that would no doubt interest a player, but don’t have larger lessons to teach. That’s fine. Every game developer’s career is like an iceberg: there’s far more that didn’t ship, didn’t matter much, than there is that made an impact.

To serve design historical purposes, there’s quite a lot in here that simply just tries to capture contemporaneous material. In the early days of MMORPGs⁸, a blog post written to the players of a particular game could turn out to be foundational enough to someday end up with a Wikipedia article of its own. I wrote a lot of essays and blog posts specifically for players of the various games; those are in here too, just just retrospective views on it all. By and large, I have left these original writings intact. Any contemporary additions or commentary arising from more years to think on it are distinguishable by the use of a different typeface.

Enough time has gone by that I don’t think it’s reasonable for younger folks to even know of some of these older games, so there are pieces in here that I hope give readers the flavor of what it was like to walk around in a text MUD, what it was like to log into the worlds of Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies at launch, and what it was like to try making a small art game before the term even existed.

For many, I imagine the best way to use this book will be to simply jump to key essays. While most of the essays here are collected from my website, http://www.raphkoster.com, there are tens of thousands of new words written specifically for this volume, in order to provide that context and connective tissue from essay to essay. It’s still a collection of individual pieces, and not a chapter book, but hopefully you can get a sense of the design story as we move forward through time.

Even if most people hop around, I do hope that at least some of you come along with me on the chronological journey through one point of view on the evolution of our connected lives. It’s been a weird few decades, and the online worlds that form the bulk of this book were prefiguring our future in ways that only a few understood at the time.

Early days

In Peru

If everything is designed, then design is everything — the motto at Toulouse Lautrec.

I spent a large chunk of my childhood in Peru. It was there, in fact, that I first started to make games. I lived in Lima, in San Isidro, a relatively well-off neighborhood. It was the height of the Shining Path⁹ terrorism period: gringo things were blown up with great regularity. The KFC. The Pizza Hut. The local arcade.

The art institute Instituto Toulouse Lautrec is launching the first ever game design program in Peru this year.¹⁰ There are programs for 3d modelers, animators, and programmers there and elsewhere already. There’s a small but thriving work-for-hire community that also does original game development. The time seemed right. When they asked me to come give a talk, it was an emotional moment — and the first time in almost thirty years that I had set foot in Lima.

I scheduled time with friends and relatives. Before I left, my mom pointed out, just as she did before I got the Online Legend Award,¹¹ that it’s important to let people know that Latinos can manage a career in the industry. People don’t think of me as Latino, and honestly, I don’t tend to think of myself that way, most of the time.

It was a long flight over — San Diego to Atlanta, from there to Lima. I arrived at a bit past midnight. When the driver in the hotel shuttle heard that I used to live there, he took me the long way around, to show me the way that things had changed. It was dark, but even in the middle of the night I could see the way development and careful in-filling had allowed the addition of a new highway on the coastal cliff from Callao to Miraflores. I fell asleep around 2:30am. Little did I know it would be the earliest bedtime I’d have during my stay.

It all began at 9am the next day. Breakfast with my oldest friend. Right after I was collected for a round of interviews and time to go over the proposed courses and syllabi for the game design program. I suggested a bit more on statistics, and wondered aloud about the amount of general traditional liberal arts education that could be offered within the context of the program. It’s a vocational school, in a sense, but I strongly believe that traditional literature, arts, history, and humanities are vitally important for a game designer.

Then an IGDA¹² party. I had brought with me all the of the board game prototypes I have been making. We didn’t get to try the newest one, but all the others were played quite a lot. I basically took over the IGDA party with play tests. Then off for dinner — at 1am.

The IGDA party, all playing my boardgames

I had been asked to run a workshop for the instructors there at the Institute the next day. It was 4 1/2 hours straight of pacing and talking. We went over industry trends, team structures, that sort of thing — then a good solid 3 hours on what I am currently calling my map of game. It’s a diagram that encompasses all the fields, subjects, ways of looking at games, mapped onto the classic interaction loop. Reference books and cited articles, resources and ideas for further investigation — all in a giant infodump. It kind of underlined for me just how far we have come, and how much there is out there now, in terms of game studies.

Then another interview... This meant we didn’t even tackle lunch until almost 3pm.

We drove by my old house. Second door, the dark one. Cops got suspicious when I kept taking photos.

Then I had to go write my talk. At this point, it was all a stew in my head, and I decided to go with an autobiographical angle, because I had by then retold the story of how I grew up there dozens of times. I had thought about doing the Map of Game thing as the talk, but instead, all of these swirling emotions and thoughts came together in my head and I decided to just do a pure inspirational talk.

Here were all these enthusiastic kids, passionate about their fighting games or their Marios, wondering whether such a thing as a videogame career was even possible in a place like Peru. Here they were, wondering whether there could be a job for them after they finished, wondering whether the country itself would have developed enough around them to make it possible.

Wondering, as Latin Americans often do, whether they are good enough, as they look around the history around them and think about the incredible resources the countries typically have, and the all-too-common wreck of things that have been made, via the legacies of colonialism and the modern imperialism of market forces. People there just all too often think they’re just not good enough, or else surely by now the country would have gotten on its feet? All too often when progress arrives, it’s in the form of malls full of American and European brands, never anything local. Often, the history of South American countries makes them intensely proud of their culture, and totally unsupportive of it in any financial sense.

The Larcomar mall. I asked if there were any Peruvian franchises in it. The answer was no.

I just desperately wanted to tell them that yes, it can be done because all you need is a pencil and paper to get started. Yes it can be done because what you really need aren’t game design programs but the passion to make yourself a lifelong learner. That yes, games matter despite what a culture might tell you about how they are for the lazy and the childish. That it’s about putting one foot in front of the other.

We never stop wondering whether we’re good enough. I stayed up until 4am another night, talking with Gonzalo Ordóñez, the Chilean artist known as Genzoman. We swapped stories of professional disappointments and how much of our work had never made it out into the world. The kids needed to know that this, too, is what success looks like.

The pun that serves as the title isn’t easily translatable, alas. In Spanish, carrera is a career, a course of study (like a major, or a degree), and it also means a race, like a footrace. I moved freely across these three meanings as I spoke.

In the end, the best I can hope is that for some of these kids, it pointed a way forward.

Una carrera

This is adapted from a speech given in Spanish entitled Una carrera, delivered at GameDay Peru in early 2015.

I was given the Online Game Legend¹³ award at GDC Online¹⁴ in 2010. The citation read in part,

Raph Koster has led a prolific career. As the lead designer on Ultima Online and the creative director on Star Wars Galaxies, his contributions helped lay the foundation for the many massively multiplayer games that followed. Koster’s professional credits span nearly every facet of game development, including writing, art, soundtrack music, programming and design.

Raph Koster is considered a thought leader, as a frequent lecturer and published author on topics of game design, community management, storytelling and ethics in game development. His A Theory of Fun, published in 2004, is considered seminal by educators and members of the art game movement, as well as being one of the most popular books ever written about games...

I worry that people look at a career and see only this: the jobs, successes, awards and invitations to give talks.

But that’s not how life is, and that’s not what I feel like inside.

Upon hearing about the award, my mother asked me for a favor. Please, she told me, mention that you are Latino. People don’t know, and you have a duty to encourage kids with dreams.

I lived in Lima, Peru, as a boy. Videogames were not common. Oh, I had played them in the States before arriving in Peru in 1979, and I continued to see them there when I went back to spend summers with my dad. My dad also sent me a copy of Dungeons & Dragons, the red box Basic set, as a birthday present.

I already read like crazy: a book a day, usually science fiction or fantasy or murder mysteries. And I don’t mean just Hardy Boys or kids’ books — those, yes, but also Theodore Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov and Robert Ludlum. I was indiscriminate.

Of course, I started to create worlds, to draw little maps.

 

Thus began my course of study: I wanted to play those videogames that weren’t making it to Peru. Pengo and Q*Bert and others weren’t in the list of the ten or so games within a few miles of where I lived. In fact, there were so few that I can still recite the list of what was available: Spider at the rotisserie chicken place; Asteroids, Gorf, Berzerk, and Star Castle at the mall. On the bus we played the Game & Watch series — the dual screen Donkey Kong and Donald & Mickey. I had a Casio game watch, the one with the falling triangle blocks where you had to make a pyramid.¹⁵

With the help of videogame magazines, I made board game versions of the videogames I didn’t have access to.

Porting a digital game to the world of tabletop play taught me the most basic thing: that games can manifest in many ways. Pengo could be decomposed into turn-based strategy. AI could be mimicked with dice or simple rules.

I started out like any other apprentice in the arts, by copying things. On my first original game, one called Jungle Climb, I basically took the ideas from the various Donkey Kong games, and drew a crude vertical platformer board. You moved a space at a time, and dodged just like you did on the LCD Game & Watch games... which was pretty dull pretty quickly, in a tabletop setting.

I then started to challenge myself on the visual front; Egyptian Graverobber required you to play against another player who controlled all the AI monsters, and try to get down to grab all the treasures and then escape. It still used basically the same mechanics.

It took several games, but eventually I took on the challenge of actually trying to create something with rules of my own invention. Based in part on the massive Gary Jennings novel Aztec (a decidedly mature read for someone who was probably thirteen at the time), The Hunt for the Treasure of Quetzalcoatl, spanned a dozen tall thin boards, with countless enemies, a randomized event generator from shuffled event decks, and a randomized quest order based on drawing cards from a separate deck. It took hours to play, and supported a bunch of kids all playing different creatures and monsters.

I look back on it now, and with hindsight, I say to myself wow, it’s almost as if I knew at age 12 that I was going to be a game designer as an adult. But that’s a lie. I thought I was going to be a writer or teacher, you see. Everyone in my family had always told me so.¹⁶

I started to do things like take existing games and do revamped versions, to try to improve them. One in particular was a remake of TSR’s Dungeon! I’m really not sure that my take was any better, but there it was. I rather quickly found to my dismay that my previous games had mostly just been about level design, map design, incident decks and movement rules. There was a whole new world at work in more sophisticated games — there was math, and statistics behind everything, stuff I just didn’t understand.

My try at a state-machine game based on sword fighting, creatively entitled Swordplay, was a miserable failure because just about everything led everywhere. I soon discovered the issue of degenerate strategies without knowing the term.

 

This basically led me to the library. I didn’t think I was studying. For me, reading up on this stuff was just part of the game of making games. By the time I hit high school I was researching ship-to-ship combat for a game called Legal Pirates, which was actually what I turned in for a class assignment in history class.¹⁷ It came with an annotated bibliography; as it happens, this was not the last time I had a bibliography for a game design, even though it was never required of me again.

It was around when I was thirteen that I discovered that computers would actually let me make my own games. Oh, I had started playing with a Pong home console well before moving to Peru, and we had an Atari 2600 with quite a bunch of cartridges. But it was clear, from reading Video Games and Electronic Games and Compute! and Creative Computing that computer gaming was where the real action was. I started learning some MS-BASIC on my dad’s CP/M-based Osborne 1, hacking Colossal Cave¹⁸ and playing ASCII versions of Pac-Man and Wari.

I begged and begged, and my great-uncle got me a 16K Atari 8-bit computer. I don’t have that one anymore, because I upgraded three times before I was 16, ending up with the 130XE. I still have it, along with my collection of games on floppy disks.

And so I threw myself into trying to create games again, just in a new medium.

My friends and I took ourselves very seriously. We actually called ourselves a company, and we put a copyright symbol by the company name (which is legally nonsensical, of course).

It took a few tries, but I made a game called Orion. And it was actually fun. It was imitative, for sure, featuring light cycles and spaceships. It consisted of linked games, so you could keep score of who won in each of the challenges. You can actually trace the progression of my programming skill over the course of the games; the first one was the light cycles; the second, I could move ships vertically but not freely; the third had free movement but not independent shots; and so on. I even had the brainstorm to bring in the kids’ game of Capture the Flag into video game form.

After five linked games, I felt like I was a game developer. I wrote a second one, a pretty terrible one where you flew around over a moonscape and shot down aliens before they reached the ground, while dodging explosive satellites. We managed to sell a copy of that one to a friend, in a Ziploc baggie.

But then I stopped.

I finished high school.

I went to college.

I thought I would go be that writer, teacher, artist.

I studied poetry, and music, and art, but this time for real. I even got an MFA in poetry.

A sheepskin doesn’t make a poet, it turns out.

While in college, I ran a play-by-email roleplay campaign, but otherwise didn’t really do much with game development. Macintosh computers were everywhere on campus—I was out of touch with programming and found the complexities of working with the newfangled graphical interfaces impenetrable. I could help fellow students with their Pascal homework, but I couldn’t put a sprite on screen. I could max out the campus high score in Crystal Quest, but I couldn’t make so much as a text adventure. My roleplay campaign was presented at a conference on academic computing by the head of the computer program, but all my creative energies went to writing.

I got pretty unhappy in grad school. There were academic politics. The writing that was in vogue felt utterly disconnected from most people’s lived experiences to me, a sort of hermetic and self-referential body of work infatuated with other academic writers. I recall huge arguments over whether Stephen King was more important a writer than whoever we happened to be studying that week. I am pretty sure I was proven right by time.

But the Internet was starting to boom. To stay in touch with friends, we started using email. And after email, a friend pointed out that there were these crazy games, reminiscent of the D&D campaigns I had run as a kid, but run over the Internet. They were called MUDs.

MUDs were text-based virtual realities, but I didn’t know that yet. I started out playing them, then in less than a year, making them. I could use the writing skills I had acquired for doing MUD development.

And MUDs were communities. Managing them, I had to study politics and sociology. The result was that the industry knocked at my door.

And so I got lucky, helping lead Ultima Online, by the time I was 25.

I say luck, and it was indeed luck. But it also happened because we dreamt of fantastic worlds and the future of cyberspace. That wasn’t something that we were equipped to build, but we tried anyway.

Even on a giant project like that, I still found myself drawing little maps with pencil. They don’t look that different from the ones from grade school, if I am honest with myself. In some ways, it feels like I ran to stand still.

And as I ran, I ran with more ambition, because you have to challenge yourself, you have to beat the boss. By the time I did Star Wars Galaxies, I was inventing new technology around procedural generation techniques, to do something that wasn’t quite possible: ship a 4 gigabyte game on a CD. I was teaching myself all the disciplines of all my colleagues, so I could do things like do all of the interface design for the game. I finally understood those mathematics behind everything, and now I was trying to turn them into magic, to allow other people to live improbable lives in impossible places.

I came to see games as gifts.

I have a daughter. She lives with Type I diabetes. When she was young, I made a videogame for her called Watersnake. The snake lives under the water, and the landscape scrolls by, all starfish with cute eyes and seaweed. The snake is always drifting down. If it hits the bottom, well, that’s a seizure and coma and possible death from a hypoglycemic event. If it goes up too high, it pokes above the water where it can’t breathe, and suffers slow damage that can never be healed, equivalent to the slow damage caused by constant high blood sugars, the slow neuropathies and circulatory damage that occurs.

You have to toss food to the snake — cupcakes, steaks, pizza, fried chicken, juice boxes — kids’ foods, things that she would want to eat herself. And you do it in order to pick up prizes under the water. Each food uses the real world glycemic index of that food to cause the snake to swim upwards, and them slowly come down. Fast carbohydrates cause the snake to shoot up to the surface and possibly the sky; slower proteins and fats cause gentle arcs.

Watersnake was a gift to my daughter.

I have a mother. She always worries that I will forget the cultures from which I sprang, my heritage. I made a game called Andean Bird, one of the very first art games, for her. In it you fly over the littoral islands off the coast of Peru, in the form of a sea bird of some sort. You fly, and you experience the wind and the sunrise and the sunset, and you listen to music and you flap your wings and read a small poem about the ways in which our memories of cultures and heritages erode.

Andean Bird was a gift to my mother.

I realize now that games themselves have been my teachers, all this time. There came a moment when I realized it was my turn to teach. After all, you take turns in games. The result was a book called A Theory of Fun for Game Design, where I tried to share back what I had learned by ranging widely over other fields. My tools for making abstruse topics easy to swallow were the same little cartoons that I drew when I was twelve.

But now, of course, I take it all so so seriously. I have a tall shelf reserved just for books that are about games, for for fields that impinge directly on the sorts of games I make. Books about hypertext, books about virtual law. Books about industry history, and books about cultural anthropology. Books about the way in which virtualizing our world provides opportunities for constant surveillance, and books about how societies find ways out of pickles like that. Books about chance, and books about economics and books about cognition, and yes, still books about poetry.

Because games deserve to be taken seriously, and players deserve to be taken seriously, and most of the worst mistakes I have made over my career, the worst game design mistakes, have happened because I failed to do that.

Ultimately, what I do deserves to be taken seriously.

So I set out to help the world create their own games, without having to go through that study process. I created a platform called Metaplace which was intended to democratize the creation of online worlds, so that we could get back the creative explosion of them that had existed in the days before World of Warcraft. Spoiler: it didn’t work. But working to create tools was yet another new design challenge, another new way to look at the problem.

Even though the platform didn’t do what we hoped, people still made amazing things. Many of our best users are developers in the industry now, some of them on award-winning titles. The platform hosted a President speaking by video, arcade games and Nordic myth and lectures and parties and games about 9/11 and games about fuzzballs.

In the end, though, you really can’t skip past the learning, I think. Those who seem to—say, lucky ones who lead a major title when they are 23—do so because they are learning in public, running forward like mad, because it is their passion. It’s their art.

Yes, I said art.

The world has changed a lot since I started. Now everyone plays games. I’ve made some for that everyone, like Island Life, My Vineyard, and Jackpot Trivia.¹⁹

There is also now a bit of a science to making games; more is understood about verbs and loops and arcs and grammars, and I helped that to happen.

There are even classes inside virtual worlds, and you can go to a games program and learn how to make games from an actual teacher.

And if you want to get creative with games, you don’t have to know how to make them yourself anymore. The games themselves are canvases and brushes, tools of creativity in their own right, and yeah, I helped make that happen too.

Lately, it has brought me all full circle. I’m back to working with cards and tokens and cluttered tabletops these days. It’s fun and challenging to work with few moving parts, without the crutches, but also with a limitless field of possibility, the way it was when I was thirteen. It’s fun to be able to go back to the prototype, back to experimentation, back to the heart of design. With a tad more confidence than before, perhaps, but never with too much. I know what pitfalls are out there now, after all.

But I also know that one learns from failures, from trying. That you dive into the thicket in order to understand it.

In the end, games connect us and teach us. They carry us from the simple to the complex; but only if we are willing to play.

Willing to play in our lives, willing to play with learning, willing to play and challenge ourselves.

This is the race we run. We are our own opponent. It’s not a bad thing to be a kid inside, if we never stop learning and never stop in that process of slowly growing up.

If we as game designers sometimes feel like we don’t fit into society, well, it’s because games form cultures, all the way in our youth, and sometimes someone is needed who can stand outside the culture and impart lessons. That is, in a sense, your cultural heritage.

You probably grew up with games. You can make them, and not be ashamed of it. You can love them, and not be ashamed of it. You can look at them, see their flaws, the ways in which people misuse them for exclusion, and work to make a change. Every year from now on, games will be a larger part of our world. They will change society as a whole. Learning to design them will prepare you for this new tech-mad planet.

It’s a career. It’s a long road.

You had better start running now.

My first game

The YouTube channel First Game Ever²⁰ started as a panel at PAX East one year. It then became a series of videos where developers shared their adventures in making their first game ever. I contributed a video,²¹ and this is more or less a written version of what I sent.

Hey there... my name is Raph Koster, and I’m probably best known for doing MMOs like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. I was asked to show you my first game...

I lived overseas as a kid. Arcades were rare, but I loved videogames. So I used to port my favorite arcade games to board games, because otherwise I couldn’t play them at home. This one wasn’t very successful... marking all the squares with little bits of paper that blew away was very fiddly.

Eventually, this led me to want to make my own games. I branded my little paper game company SUPERGAME and would sell copies to other kids during recess. Check it out, this one was so popular in 8th grade that I claimed it was already a classic!... in magic marker.

So I started to beg my mom for a computer. And eventually my brother and I got one as a gift from my great-uncle. It was an Atari 600XL, which was eventually upgraded to a 130XE. This one, in fact. I still have it in working condition.

I of course immediately went nuts playing games on it: the classics like Archon and MULE and the Infocom text adventures. But I also started to learn to program. I was 14, and I did it out of books like these – check out the introduction, written by a certain science fiction writer before he was famous!²²

And by typing in listings in magazines (which were also very hard to come by overseas!). And with this, I taught myself BASIC, and eventually a little bit of 6502 machine language which I have completely forgotten.

And that led to my first game, which we’re going to boot up right now.

So, some friends and I started a little fake game company called Protocom. You can see we stuck copyright symbols on everything because we thought it was important. We sold games in Ziploc baggies with homemade labels, because we had heard that Richard Garriott got his start with Ultima that way. Who knew then that I would be working with him ten years later...

We had a cassette deck that we loaded games from before we had a disk drive. You could make the tape start to play anytime from code, which is why we had Van Halen’s 1984 for the soundtrack. This loading screen is insanely slow, so I am going to let the video speed up... but it originally ran long enough so that you could hear the whole song, and then it would go into Jump for the first match. It wasn’t slow because it was doing anything. It was slow because computers were slow. This game ran in like 8k of memory and was written all in BASIC on a 1.79MHz machine.

The first thing I did was make a clone of Tron’s lightcycles. I couldn’t clone anything else – that would have been too hard! Light cycles was easy. A big lesson: there is no shame in starting out cloning stuff. You learn a lot that way.

This was actually not one program – it was six of them, each loaded from disk while the victory screen played. And all of them were two player, because I had no idea how to write AI. In the second game, I tried having a ship on screen. They were stuck at the edges because I didn’t know how to do collision detection, but I could check that they were at the same height, so that way I could tell when the shots hit each other. Oh, and the explosion animation sucked.

By the third one, you can see the ships move, but they flicker, because I was erasing and redrawing them every frame (yeah, that flicker is the framerate). But when you shoot, everything stops, because I didn’t know how to make shots move independently of the main loop yet.

At least the explosion is more dramatic.

Then I had a brilliant idea. Why not adapt the playground game capture the flag? I probably should have patented that. I was used to asymmetric PvP design because in the board game adaptations, one player always had to play the computer.

This was also the first time I ever did procedural map generation. I’ve never stopped, still a go-to tool for me.

By the fifth game, I had learned how to replace the character set with custom graphics. So here we have an early deathmatch in a maze. This actually has a bug in it, you can end up with a starting map that traps you in the corner. You had to reset the machine to deal with it.

So at fourteen, I made all of the art and all of the music (except for Jump, of course), all of the graphics and all of the coding... Believe it or not, we played Orion for MONTHS.

In retrospect, it foreshadows a lot of my career doing Ultima Online & Star Wars Galaxies: multiplayer games full of PvP, insane technical overreaching, way way too many games stuffed into one box, tons of bugs... and more fun than they deserve to be.

The biggest thing it taught me is simple: it can be done.

We sold one copy. I consider it highly profitable.

MUDs

What is a MUD?

MUDs are the ancestral virtual worlds.²³

Invented by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle around 1978, MUDs are a multi-user version of old text adventures like Zork and Colossal Cave. Those games described where the player was standing in text, and let them perform commands by typing in pairs of words. When the game started, you’d see a room description like this, and interact with what was going on by typing commands:

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

> enter building

You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring.

There are some keys on the ground here.

There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.

There is tasty food here.

There is a bottle of water here.

MUDs worked the same way, except that other people were playing the game at the same time. You connected to a remote server,²⁴ and when other people happened to be in the same room as you, you could see it just like you saw the bottle of water and the tasty food in the above example. Kaige is here. And if Kaige typed in

say hello

then you’d see

Kaige says, ‘hello’

Add pictures, and you’d get a graphical MUD. Add full immersive 3d graphics, and you’d get something like World of Warcraft. In fact, watching only the text box in a modern MMO is strongly reminiscent of playing a MUD.

MUDs spread all over the early Internet throughout the ‘80s, and by the late ‘80s and early ‘90s were speciating into a variety of sorts of virtual world: ones for hack ‘n’ slash combat like most MMOs today, ones dedicated to pure roleplaying where out-of-character behavior wasn’t even allowed, ones just for hanging out and talking, and ones where users could actually build and change the world on the fly, much like Second Life now.

These various approaches to MUDs tended to go hand in hand with codebases, or varying versions of the server software that offered different capabilities based on what that particular world was about. Roleplayers tended to be on MUSHes,²⁵ the various MOO²⁶ codebases offered the most power for users who wanted to engage in online creation, and various sorts of MUD with names like LPMud, DikuMUD, and so on, were primarily game worlds.

Most of today’s MMOs descend in a direct line from MUDs, and most of the early MMO developers were MUDders first.

What is a Diku?

It’s common to hear the word Diku tossed around, but many these days have no memory of where the word came from, or why some might call a game like World of Warcraft a form of Diku. This essay is from January 9th, 2009.

DikuMUD was derived from AberMUD,²⁷ which had similar mechanics, but had more of a scavenger hunt mentality in some ways.

At its core, it is a class-based RPG with the principal classes being fighter, healer, wizard, thief. (Later codebases added more). It was heavily based on the combat portion of Dungeons & Dragons. Advancement was handled by earning experience points through combat, reaching a set amount of points, returning to town and levelling up, which unlocked new abilities. Classes were immutable (though eventually systems such as remorting,²⁸ etc were added). Rewards for killing things also included equipment, which affected your stats and damage capability. If you reached the maximum level, common cultural practice was that you were invited to become a game admin (this practice dates back to much earlier, and existed in some form in MUD1).

Combat was generally on a fixed rate, with faster attacks in cruder systems consisting of actually running the same attack multiple times in a row (so you could only do damage on multiples: 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x, 7x, 8x, 9x). More advanced systems added true variable interval attacks. Tactics were centered around controlling which target the mob was attacking, and using special state-affecting attacks that did things like trigger periods of indefensibility (stun), periods of damage multipliers, etc, using stances.²⁹

Much of the gameplay consisted of moving about solo or in groups attacking monsters for experience points³⁰ and loot. Grouping was a typical strategy because it was a large force multiplier, permitting players to kill targets much more powerful than they were alone. Because of this, an array of systems including level limits on equipment, on grouping,³¹ and even on monster attacking were in place. A command called consider told you whether the monster was too easy or too hard.

Monsters spawned originally on time intervals called resets. At first, the whole zone reset at once, then resets evolved in Diku-derived codebases into per-monster timers. (A zone was a collection of world data, including rooms, monsters, and items — each zone could at first have 100 of each). There evolved the practice of rare spawns and eventually rare drops as well.

Weapons, potions, and the like were all based on simply on performing spell effects, in the fashion today referred to as a "proc.³² They were hardcoded back then, however. Players had the typical array of D&D stats, with the addition of move points," which were literally spent by moving from room to room and based on the weight of stuff you were carrying and your strength. You had to rest to recover these.

Death in Dikus involved losing all your gear, because everything stayed in the corpse. It also could set you back levels, as it cost you a fraction of your experience points. You respawned back in town at the central spawn point, and in later codebases at your guildhall (a class-specific spawn point and levelling trainer). You then had to do a corpse run to get back to your body naked and reequip your gear. In an inheritance from aspects of AberMuds, you could scavenge gear from the donation room which was a place where excess gear nobody wanted (usually from outlevelling it or from trash drops) went when it was donated or sacrificed by other players.

This was not the only means of trying to keep the economy balanced. Every item had a cash value (the value for which it was sold in NPC³³ shops). In some Dikus, you got a fixed limit on what you could save with your character, said limit based on a maximum cash value. If you saved your character at a point where you were in excess of this limit, you were saved with nothing. In others, you simply could not save your character state. (State saving was manual, and you had to go to an inn to do it). There were also systems whereby your save time was limited, because you had to pay rent at the inn where you logged out. The rent was proportional to the stuff you had, which drove people back to the game to keep earning gold.

Despite this huge sink, it was common for the economy to spiral out of control (termed mudflation) and for the admins to wipe all items or even all characters. It was also common for the mud to crash, and corpses and stuff on the ground did not persist, since Dikus were a character state system.³⁴

DikuMuds came with stock areas,³⁵ the best known of which is Midgaard, the main city. Many mudders from the time period would judge a DikuMUD based on whether Midgaard was the first thing they saw. Midgaard came to also feature stock tutorials called mud school which saw you through the first fight. Zones were built by editing text files, though eventually forms of online editing tools (OLC, for online creation) were added. Because map building was relatively easy, many Dikus were based on popular hack ‘n’ slash fantasy fiction such as Forgotten Realms, Fred Saberhagen, Wheel of Time, etc.

DikuMUDs did not come out of the box with any quests, because they were not a programmable game engine. They were about combat and levelling up. There was no crafting either. They did come with good chat features, grouping, etc. Clans were a common addition — you would call them guilds today, except that they were formed by admin command, not formed freely by players. (Honestly, I am not sure where free-form clan formation came from. I know we did it on LegendMUD, and we did it in UO, but I don’t even remember which came first!)³⁶

Believe it or not, Dikus did have simple pets out of the box (usually summoned and non-persistent). They also had hunger and thirst (with a requirement to eat and drink regularly for good health), containers, inventory, in-game messaging and bulletin boards, chat channels (at first just via shout) and so on. They were quite sociable, because of the grouping requirements, the corpse mechanics, and the move rate factor. Towns tended to have fountains in them so you could drink and rest, for example, and people would gather there.

Eventually Diku games added questing engines, then scripting languages (see Worlds of Carnage),³⁷ etc, and diversity developed. Because they were functional games with content out of the box, many stock muds were created, which had little differentiation from one another. If you knew some C you could customize the game some, and the single commonest means of doing so was to add more classes, more levels, and more player races. It got to be a common sight to see games advertising 20 classes, 30 races, and 500 levels!!!!! without actually offering different gameplay.

It is important to realize that Dikus were the least flexible codebase at the time. The other dominant codebases were built to be programmable platforms out of the box: MUSH, MOO, and LPMuds³⁸ all had significantly greater capabilities and flexibility. They were scriptable out of the box, had online creation support rather than requiring you to create content in flat text files, and most importantly, the core rulesets for a game were written in the platform, using the softcode tools that were available. Because of this, tracing the history of a given mud feature backwards will usually find that it didn’t originate on Dikus.

That said, Diku codebases did eventually popularize many of the major developments in muds. Procedural zones had been done before; in Dikus, you saw 1,000 room procedural dungeons.  Instancing, public quests, player housing (in the style we know today, as opposed to UGC systems),³⁹ the modern scripting system model, the modern persistence system, and aspects of zone-based PvP all were developed or hugely elaborated on DikuMUDs. In addition, once scripting hit, DikuMUDs arguably saw the flowering of quests to a level unseen in other codebases (this is of course, a matter of opinion!). Diku derivatives gained things that got going first on other codebases, like banks, auction houses, PvP systems, player-formed clans, moods systems, player government systems, overhead ASCII maps, and even tags for sound effects. Many Dikus had strict enforcement of rules regarding roleplaying, and even required players to stay in character at all times, or submit essays as applications to play. Despite this, the core remained hack n slash, with many terming Diku gameplay roll-playing.

If Abers set the template, Diku was the root from which a huge portion of muds sprang, because they were so easy to get running (though hard to customize). As the initial code was released as open source (though not under what we would today call an open license),⁴⁰ many variants were made and also released, and many of these then also resulted in derivatives, etc. When I did the tally in the late 90s, Diku-derived muds accounted for around 60% of all muds running. Considering there were at least three other major codebases and traditions with radically different architectures and significantly more power and flexibility, this was quite an achievement. By the end of their dominance, the Dikus were beginning to rival other codebases such as MOOs and LPMuds in flexibility, whilst still retaining a simpler core architecture than either.

Because they were template fill-in-the-blank muds, most of them were very similar, and had to differentiate solely on their world building and fiction. However, few altered the basic combat equation. Among other terms tanking, nuking and the like were common.⁴¹ (Thieves were sort of a nuker, in some ways — they were used to initiate combat with a backstab attack that did up to quadruple damage — they then they had to get out of the way! They were also used as scouts because they could move without triggering aggro). In fact, kiting also took place quite a lot, by leading high level aggressive mobs into low level areas.

Everquest was created by players of DikuMUDs (specifically Forgotten Realms ones — Sojourn, Toril, Duris), and even had the same wording for many server-generated messages (it begins to rain, which was completely superfluous for a 3d game!). It played so similarly to its inspirations that some wondered if it actually was a DikuMUD, with graphics added on, which was a (false) rumor.⁴² Meridian 59 had DikuMUD players on its team. Ultima Online had three Diku players on the original core team (and a couple folks from other codebases). Of the early MMORPGs, UO played the least like a Diku, whereas the line of inheritance from Diku to EQ and thence to World of Warcraft is completely undeniable.

In the end, the central elements of phase-based combat, combat states, cool-down based special attacks, tank-healer-nuker triad, and basic aggro management are what you play today in WoW. A Diku player from the late mudding period would feel completely at home if you just gave them slash commands and a text box. They’d be astonished by the number of quests, would think the crafting system was insane, and would think that the entire PvP system was either a rip from an EmlenMUD⁴³ or was teleporting you to HoloMUD,⁴⁴ in the case of the battlefields. Even raids would feel a lot like a group of groups tackling a level 50, albeit at a scale