Raph's Koster Website

DriveThruRPG.com is doing a clever charity drive for Doctors Without Borders and Haiti — give a $20 donation, and they will give a coupon for $1481.31 worth of digitally downloaded RPGs and materials. You can also give $5 or $10, and they will match the donation Donate $20 and get a coupon for over a thousand [...]

There’s an article on CNet about measuring the size of a few areas of the brain, and comparing them to your success at different aspects of playing a specific game. This was a study done at UI by a host of research groups. Researchers found that players with a larger caudate nucleus and putamen did best [...]

Let’s take this scenario for a moment. Bob trusts Alice. Bob tells Alice something that he doesn’t want anyone else to know and he tells her not to tell anyone. Alice tells everyone at school because she believes she can gain social stature from it. Bob is hurt and embarrassed. His trust in Alice diminishes. [...]

As many of you know, I read plenty of detective novels. Today the news comes to me that Robert B. Parker has died. He of course, wrote all the Spenser novels (which became the TV show with Robert Urich), the Jesse Stone novels (which became the TV movies starring Tom Selleck), the Sunny Randall novels, a [...]

First-Person Tetris. Basically, as you play, you rotate blocks. But when you rotate the block, the screen rotates. It is very cool to see how much this single difference in the feedback and controls changes the game — practically a game grammar example!

It seems that every few years there is a major earthquake somewhere I have lived. Now it is a major one near Port-au-Prince in Haiti. I hear the hotel where I lived for two years partly fell down. The hospital where one of my brothers was born has collapsed. Schools have crumbled, and even the Palace. [...]

Saw this go by! The San Francisco UX Book Club will hold its next meeting on Wednesday, January 20th at 7-9PM. The meeting will focus on “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Raph Koster. Kevin Cheng (http://kevnull.com/) will be moderating. We are still trying to confirm the venue. I’ll update that information later this week! Wish i [...]

For those who haven’t seen Kodu, it’s a visual game development environment originally created for educators and running on the Xbox 360. It uses pie menus, and a game controller, and basically, a graphical language based around trigger events, to allow even children to develop games. ArsTechnica is reporting that Kodu now runs on the PC [...]

Korea Supreme Court rules virtual currency convertible – PlayNoEvil I think the headline says it all.

So, I finally got around to watching Avatar yesterday. In 2d, not 3d, as it happens. I enjoyed it a lot. It was fun, and yes, it even left me thinking. But it left me thinking in probably not the way that the filmmakers intended, because the core problem with it and the reason, I think, [...]

There is a wonderful new blog up called The Psychology of Video Games, written by Jamie Madigan, who has a PhD in psychology. It basically looks at individual “brain hacks” so to speak and explains specific incidents in games using them (similar to how I’ve referenced these brain hacks in that Games Are Math talk, [...]

In the past I have written and spoken about what I called “Moore’s Wall,” which could be summarized as the notion that expanding computing capabilities give us higher bars to reach which then result in higher costs and development times, and not actually better products. Well, Toshiba just announced a TV at CES that circumvents this [...]

Boy, have I neglected the blog. Here’s some stuff I said to myself, “I should blog that” that flew by. Near Death Studios, the company that has been behind Meridian 59 for the last nine years or so, is closing. The game will keep running, but it won’t be a business concern anymore. The procedurally-generated MMO Love [...]

Some of you long-time blog readers may recall a little public project of mine called Andean Bird.* But that is not what I am writing about. Instead, I wanted to call your attention to this! That’s a prototype by Michael Wilson, who writes Hello there. I enjoyed your playing with your ‘Andean Bird’ prototype three years back, [...]

To say goodbye to Metaplace.com in style, there’s a party scheduled at noon tomorrow January 1st, probably running all the way until the lights go out at midnight. Please come on by and hang out! I am also going to do one last, final farewell concert, after some users asked me to. It will be at [...]

…means reading those crazy crazy liner notes, full of pretention and affection. …means finding Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band and Steve Martin as a wild and crazy guy. …means wondering why my wife had so much Barry Gibb when she was a young teen. And uh, Crystal Gayle? …means laughing over the albums that we gave each other on [...]