Game design is an art and a craft

Raph Koster is a game designer working at Sony Online Entertainment as creative director. He makes massively multiplayer games, which are basically large-scale graphical virtual worlds.

He was the lead designer for Ultima Online and he is currently working on Star Wars Galaxies, the Sony Online and LucasArts which is candidated to be the first million-subscriber online game.

These are some interesting thoughs on game design cited from his home page:

Game design is an art and a craft, and like all arts and crafts, it has techniques and approaches, and that implies that it can support a criticism; said criticism exists though it is not very sophisticated. Mud design is also an art and a craft, and it also has techniques and approaches, but there is no criticism, no self-evaluation, no standards defined, no study of what has gone before. And without self-critique, it cannot improve except in fits and starts. If this genre is to evolve into more than game design, which I firmly believe it has already begun to do, then it will have to support at least the critical apparatus of game design, and preferably the critical apparatus of many disciplines that most people do not bother to link: server design, and writing, and hypertextual theory, and art (for graphics are coming and will dominate, it’s not worth fighting over), and psychology and sociology… Game designers today generally do not know even the short history of computer game design; we must as a community educate ourselves and each other if we want the community and its art and craft to grow.

–from a newsgroup posting c. 1995

From: Raph Koster’s Website

The bold text is mine.

Some useful resources accessible on Raph Koster’s Website:

Online World Timeline
A timeline for the development of virtual worlds: from 1937 with The Hobbit to 2002.
(n.b.: the URL above is referring to a an internal page of a frame)

Online game design essays
A riche set of writings with many useful spots for inspiration and further research. Some selected excerpts following:

A Story About a Tree

A story about why online games are not just games.

Who Are These People Anyway?

A discussion of how player types affect an online community.

A Community Cookbook

Things you can do to make your online community stronger.

Video Games, and Online Worlds, as Art

Can they be art? If they are art, how do we critique them?

Online World Design Patterns

Standard design patterns for avatars, online game mechanics, persistence models, spawning, map structures, advancement models, PvP models, narrative in online worlds, and lastly, communications systems.

What Does It Take to Make a Successful Persistent Online World

Words of Wisdom: What it Takes to be a Junior/Entry Game Designer

Storytelling in the Online Medium

A Theory of Fun

This is the keynote speech I delivered at the Austin Games Conference in 2003. It’s trying to be about cognition, media, and the place of games in society, as well as trumpeting a call to arms regarding games as socially significant, and yes, even being art. Mostly, though, it’s about my doodling.

Insubstantial Pageants: Designing Virtual Worlds, free online book on online world design

Further references:

• Google search for “raph koster”
• Latest news by Google on “raph koster”