UO - Past Dev Team Members - Raph “Designer Dragon” Koster”
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>> List of Past UO Developers
One of the original Ultima Online team members.
Search UOCodex.com for Raph Koster news
aka: Designer Dragon (sometimes DesignerDragon or “DD”)
Name: Raph Koster
Years Working on UO: 1995 - 1999
Position(s): Lead Designer, Artist, Programmer
Worked On:
- Ultima Online - Lead Designer, Additional Artist, Additional Programmer
- Ultima Online: The Second Age (T2A) - Lead Designer
Notes:
- Married to Kristen “Kaige” Koster
Interviews/Comments on UO
RaphKoster.com - Post Mortem
RaphKoster.com - UO’s Resource System
RaphKoster.com - A Story About a Tree - May, 1998
RaphKoster.com - Laws About Online Worlds (Collection)
RaphKoster.com - Declaring the Rights of Players Aug 2000
Raph Koster on Fire - The Escapist
A Conversation with Raph Koster GameStudies.org - March 22, 2004
GameSpot Q&A - February 14, 2006
Where Are They Now?
- April 2006 - Working on something independent - entry at his web page
What Else Did They Do?
- EverQuest II: Kingdom of Sky (Sony Online Entertainment Inc.) - Chief Creative Officer
- EverQuest II: Desert of Flames (Sony Online Entertainment Inc.) - Chief Creative Officer
- Star Wars: Galaxies - The Total Experience (LucasArts) - Chief Creative Officer
- EverQuest II (Sony Online Entertainment Inc.) - Chief Creative Officer
- Star Wars: Galaxies - Jump to Light Speed (LucasArts) - Chief Creative Officer
- Star Wars: Galaxies - An Empire Divided (LucasArts) - Creative Director
- Wrote a Book - A Theory of Fun for Game Design
- For full list, see MobyGames entry linked below
Other/External Sites:
- RaphKoster.com - Personal Website
- Wikpedia Entry
- MobyGames.com Bio
Raph Koster on Fire - The Escapist (Interview)
OK, but what is it about?
It’s about* What fun is
* Why some games are fun and some games are boring
* How different people respond to different kinds of fun
* What makes a game fun or not
* How games fit into the wider human culture
* Whether games can be art
* What degree of social responsibility game makers need to have
* How games can developAt its core, though, it is about why games matter.
Notable Quotes:
From RaphKoster.com - Post Mortem:
First off, I have no patience for harassers, assholes, etc. They make my physically very angry when I see them, and during my whole time at OSI I was continually frustrated by the lack of action against them. I know many of you will not believe this statement, or will think it hypocritical, but I ask you to take it at face value.
When we started up UO, we were very naive about some things. For one thing, the game design was originally for a MUCH smaller world. We were asked to change it from a 300 player game to a 3000 player game around nine months before ship. All of our expectations were for not only a smaller simulatenous population, but also for a smaller playerbase in general–forecasts for sales were not very high, and the most successful online game to date at that time was Meridian 59. We expected to do better, but not by an order of magnitude.
I used to think that a richer, more challenging game would be rewarded. I am no longer sure that is the case. I think that had we just made the same game we had made previously, only bigger, that UO would probably have done much better. The market, and more particularly the players, don’t reward experimentation very much. More people are willing to do the same repetitive activity over and over again for the sake of getting a red polkadotted item to replace the green striped one, than are willing to engage in a broader range of activity. This is evident industry-wide, to my mind, and I am not saying to slam on EQ (especially not given that I work for Verant now). More as a comment on the audience in general–most people want mere entertainment, stuff that is easy to cope with. Stuff that doesn’t make them ask questions of themselves. Witness TV and movies and books, all of which are mostly affirmations that “you’re doing the right thing” or “whatever you do is normal compared to THIS.”
Being safe from evil is, in my mind, an uneven tradeoff for the fact that you don’t get to be heroes anymore, in that you can just opt out of fighting evil. It may be nobody wants to be heroes except when it doesn’t count, when it isn’t challenging, that people would rather fight “pretend evil” than the real thing, but I don’t personally believe that. I still think people are better than that. I know this is an odd and probably controversial (perhaps even stupid) position to take, but it’s how I feel. I think that the greatest value of interactive entertainment is when it engages you for real, and teaches you things for real. It is what made the Ultima series great. For me, the struggle to be good, to be one of the good guys, is where people were really challenged in UO, and it’s not really a challenge that exists elsewhere. Sure, you can choose not to use ShowEQ, or choose not to auction spawn points in AC on eBay, but these are not as immediate and direct as dealing with people “virtually” face to face. Being safe from the only real evil in the game, and choosing not to fight it is, well, just fine, but it’s also nothing that is going to teach you about where you stand. It’s the difference between living the Virtues and, well, playing them in a computer game.
It kinda saddens me and scares me to write the above paragraph, because I know that many will misread my intent in writing it, will take bits out of context, will feel insulted. But I don’t mean any of that by it. The failure was ours in setting up the game, for not making it possible enough to live the Virtues and establish by consensus a better place, a better society. This is why I proposed elsewhere in the thread letting people fall back on the code crutch of a safe zone once they had done it once, at least. You still get the experience of actually building a society, but after that the hard part (keeping it going) is handled for you. (Yes, townstones are at the top of my “wish we had gotten it into the game” list).
I can’t think of any better experience to have in ANY game of ANY sort than for real people to work together against antisocial activity, selfish people, and other forms of creeping insidious evil, and WIN, and build something lasting and good. To work together and have fun together with types of people they never would have considered worth speaking to otherwise. And yes, to convert a few selfish jerks into better people along the way. If having this experience in a game means that they are more likely to dare to do it in real life instead of living in passivity, then I’ll feel like something really important has been accomplished.
From Escapist Interview:
The heart of UO was in many ways the original ecology system, which I wrote about at some length on my blog. It didn’t pan out, but even what we managed to get in there did in fact open up a lot of doors. I think we hit a lot of [our design goals], and were close to having much of it working, but the PK [player killing] problem basically undermined everything.”
“A big part of why I fought the PK switch was because it meant we were trading away player self-determination for security - echoes of today’s political situation, in some ways! UO often felt like long days of taking out things we had put into the game because players found ways to hurt each other with the toys we gave them….
On the other hand, in terms of what I expected players to do with it, I think [UO] exceeded every wildest expectation. The players don’t care about what you wanted there, about what the dreams were - they only care about what they have in front of them, and then they proceed to do things you never imagined. And in UO’s case, a lot of what they managed to come up with was truly amazing and not at all something I had ever pictured.
RK: I think one of the big contrasts for me, one of the things to compare between the two, is that Ultima Online from early on was kind of a garage project in a sense… a very small group.
CP: How many people where there when you started?
RK: Five, six… A pretty small group that only later, had many people added on to it. So Ultima Online was one of those things that probably could have gone away at any moment. Although most of us were new to the industry—we didn’t have any awareness of that.
