Raph Koster

Aug 7, 2024 | raphkoster.com | Raph Koster

I’ve been doing MMOs and online worlds a long time. And that means that I’ve written and said a lot of things on the Internet over the years, about designing them. One of the funny things about reactions to the various vision blogs for Stars Reach is the number of people who have popped up on various MMO forums whose entire impression of me and my design approaches is formed by their experience getting playerkilled in Ultima Online twenty-five years ago.

Jun 28, 2024 | raphkoster.com | Raph Koster

It’s been years of work, and we are far from done, but I am super happy to finally reveal what I have been working on at Playable Worlds: Stars Reach. This is the game I have wanted to make for nearly thirty years. It is the spiritual sequel to Ultima Online and to Star Wars Galaxies. It has in it all the lessons of all these decades of online game development — and it looks forward, not back, to reinvent what an online world can be. I believe it does things that other games just can’t do.

Dec 22, 2023 | a16zcrypto.com | Raph Koster |Donella Meadows |Chris Miller |Richard Rhodes

In the spirit of sharing what we’re reading — a regular tradition around here; see our just-published winter 2023 list of books (+games, movies, and more), as crowdsourced from team a16z crypto — below are some of the books we recently curated for the giveaway library at our second annual a16z crypto Founder Summit.

Nov 21, 2023 | shepherd.com | Wagner James Au |Neal Stephenson |Julian Dibbell |Raph Koster

The OG Metaverse novel is still as smart, hilarious, rollicking, and inspirational as it was 30 years ago. I’m amazed at how many technologists talking about the concept have not read it and realized how influential and prophetic it actually is, envisioning scenes of virtual life that have since become commonplace for millions of Internet denizens. Often pigeonholed as a standard dystopian sci-fi tale, Snow Crash is too sly, satirical, and kinetic to fit that category.

Sep 2, 2023 | raphkoster.com | Raph Koster

The new daily game at the New York Times is called Connections, and I’ve seen a few people comment that they just don’t like it as much as Wordle or Spelling Bee. That the difficulty is inconsistent and it often makes you just feel stupid. I thought it would be interesting to contrast this to Word Dad, a puzzle game made by my friend, master game designer John Cutter. All three of these are more correctly called puzzles, of course.