Raph Koster

Life

Raphael Koster was born on September 7, 1971, on Long Island, New York. He studied English, with a concentration in creative writing, and Spanish at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, graduating in 1992, and in May of that year married Kristen, who would later work beside him as a game designer. He then went south to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in poetry in 1995. It is a telling pedigree for the man who would do more than almost anyone to articulate what online worlds are for: he came to game design as a writer who thought hard about form.

His real apprenticeship, though, happened at night on the internet. The MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), the text-based multi-user dungeon descended from Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw's MUD1, was by the early 1990s a thriving underground of volunteer-run worlds. Koster became a developer on Worlds of Carnage in 1992, played the Tolkien-themed MUME, and in 1994 became an implementor on LegendMUD, a historically flavored world where he went by the name Ptah. MUDs taught him the lessons that would define his career: that players build societies, that griefers and thieves emerge as surely as heroes, and that the administrators of a shared world are closer to governors than to storytellers.

Work

In 1995 Origin Systems, the Austin studio of Richard Garriott, hired Koster for its most ambitious experiment: an online version of Ultima. The initial team around Garriott and producer Starr Long was small, and Koster became lead designer of what launched on September 24, 1997, as Ultima Online. Drawing on MUDs such as DartMUD, he and his colleagues designed not a quest line but an ecology: a persistent world with a player-driven economy, dozens of skills instead of rigid classes, player housing, and the freedom to be a villain. Koster explained the philosophy bluntly: a world where you are safe from evil is one where you no longer get to be a hero. He kept up a running conversation with players through public "designer letters" signed Designer Dragon, an early model of the transparent developer that later studios would imitate.

The experiment was a commercial triumph and a social laboratory. Ultima Online reached 100,000 paying subscribers within about six months, far beyond any earlier online game, and players promptly tested every assumption. The beta-test killing of Garriott's avatar in the Assassination of Lord British, rampant player killing, duped gold and a thriving gray market foreshadowed the Virtual Economies, Gold Farming & the GDP of Norrath that economists would later study in EverQuest's Norrath. Koster's May 1998 essay "A Story About a Tree," about a player's memorial within a MUD, became a touchstone for designers thinking about what online communities mean to the people in them. He led design on the expansion Ultima Online: The Second Age (1998) before leaving Origin in 2000.

That year he joined Verant Interactive in Austin, the team behind EverQuest, as creative director of Star Wars Galaxies. The game, whose base edition An Empire Divided launched on June 26, 2003, pushed his sandbox ideas further, with player-run crafting economies, player cities and non-combat professions such as entertainers. Promoted to chief creative officer of Sony Online Entertainment in 2003, he moved to San Diego and oversaw a portfolio that included EverQuest II (2004). Galaxies was later overhauled by the controversial 2005 "New Game Enhancements" and closed in December 2011.

Koster left Sony in March 2006 to found Areae, later renamed Metaplace, a platform for building small online worlds; the social-games company Playdom acquired it in 2010, shortly before Disney bought Playdom. Meanwhile he became the field's most widely read theorist. His "Laws of Online World Design" (GDC 1999) gathered hard-won maxims from the MUD era; "Declaring the Rights of Avatars" asked what obligations world-owners have to players; and A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2004), a short illustrated book with a foreword by Will Wright, argued that fun is the brain's pleasure in learning patterns. O'Reilly later published a revised tenth-anniversary edition. In 2019 he co-founded Playable Worlds with Eric Goldberg to build Stars Reach, a sandbox MMO that returns to the ideas he first tested in Britannia.

Legacy

Koster's name sits at the hinge between the text worlds of the 1980s and the graphical MMORPGs industry that followed. Ultima Online proved that tens of thousands of people would pay monthly to live in a fantasy world, opening the road for EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Lineage and eventually World of Warcraft; its later split into a consensual and a lawless ruleset (Trammel and Felucca, introduced in 2000) became the industry's defining case study in the tension between freedom and safety.

His larger influence is intellectual. Few designers have written as much, as clearly, about why online worlds behave as they do, and his essays remain assigned reading in game-design courses. He was a charter member of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, was named to Game Informer's list of the 100 greatest developers in 2006, and received the GDC Online "Online Game Legend" award in 2012. For visitors to this museum, Koster is the bridge between the MUD rooms of the Worlds Online tour and the living, argumentative player societies that followed them.