From the people I've talked to in the industry Mr. Koster has been "too big for his britches" for a while now and pontificating just a little too much.

The proof is in your games, not your rhetoric. When I see a very successful game of yours in the next 5 years I might be willing to read through all of your verbiage to get to the good stuff.

I still believe the word 'dead' should be banned in game-related articles.

@JohnnyLA: Technically, Ultima Online is doing more successfully still than about a dozen other MMO's put together.

@Kirbytheslayer: If subsistence is the measure of success, sure.

Don't you just love how MMO designers always say that single player gaming is a dying breed, and that the MMO is the future of gaming?

You give me an MMO with a real story, voice acting, character development, and events actually worth doing, and we'll talk. Until then, I'm sticking with my console RPGs.

@Archaotic: Story, voice acting, character development, and interesting events are things of the past. Grind is the future.

Man, fuck Raph Koster. Motherfucker is so concerned with making the interactions between players nuanced ( read: stupid drama fests) that he cant make a decent combat mechanic system to save his life.

@wayneofspades:
Sure seems like it with all the MMOs coming out finding new, non-plotty ways to disguise grinding. Bah.

Kevin Smith On Game Grammar and Creating Fun

@DannoHung: You know, he doesn't actually build these games by himself, right? And, shit, he's one of the few people out there trying to find ways to get people to interact, rather than just playing "alone, together". And that makes the difference between a fully functional online world and just another game.

He's got a better grasp of what makes an MMO fun than almost any other developer out there, at the moment. That's why Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies had such rabid followings in the beginning (up until the point where he wasn't involved anymore). I mean, he literally wrote the book on fun.

@wayneofspades: "Grind is the future." Man, that is pure d poetry.

As long as idiots exist, single player gaming will always be important.

@AdmiralRupert: Are you implying that single player gaming is necessary to get away from the idiots, or that only idiots play single player games?

If single-player gaming dies, I'm finding another hobby. Nearly every one the best gaming moments ever, I've had alone, without other people around to screw it up.

MMOs aren't games. They're obsessions for nerds and Koreans.

Anyone can make a MMO. It's not like you have to really have a story. Just make people think your imaginary items hold some sort of value and watch them work hard to obtain them and sell them on ebay.

@frankstallone: I think you mean, "Anyone can make a bad MMO". There's a difference, although you couldn't tell, looking at the current games out there. The games he worked with at least managed to break the mold, at least while he was there.

You can't just blow off a whole genre, though. You could say the same thing about any game (minus the part about eBay).

He needs to actually do something and STFU. He has a very short resume' to be running around like some MMOG god.

Well, he was the lead designer for both Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, two games with *fantastic* design (just flawed in other departments he wasn't correlated with), so he has some merit if he wants to boast. I'd definitely look into an MMO if I knew he was designing it.

For those interested, the patent thing is on the last page. He does explain what patents are pretty nicely ("What a patent does is you say, 'Hey, I have this idea, so I'm laying a stake in the ground. I'm laying claim to this.'") but then completely jumps the shark when he tries to explain why we need them. He explains:

"But if somebody really does invent something totally earth-shattering, or invent something not necessarily earth-shattering -- just a very specific little highly useful thing. It's like, "We made this cool thing and it's a really useful tool!" They should be able to sell that, and not have somebody just copy it and run with it. So they are kind of necessary."

This is just bullshit. History of mankind has shown that ideas should be public domain. Nobody should own ideas. Allowing people to own ideas just creates artificial monopolies. If somebody does invent something earth-shattering, he should use his idea for all it's worth, but he should not be able to keep others from having the same idea, or improving upon his idea.

A few examples close to us are the stupid Namco patent or the rumble.

Only Namco has games that have little minigames during load times, and they aren't even used well - in Ridge Racer, you can play while the game loads, but not while a track loads, so it's totally useless, and no other company can do it better because Namco owns the idiotic patent.
The only company really working on rumble innovation is Immersion. Why? Every other company is afraid that they'll get sued into oblivion by Immersion. So instead of innovation, we get a situation where we either get crappy rumble (see Nintendo) or somewhat less, but still crappy rumble (see Microsoft) or no rumble at all until millions are paid (see Sony).

Personally, as a software engineer, I have to live in the constant fear that any semi-large company could sue me at any time because I probably violate hundreds of patents; while chinese engineers don't have to care about patents and thus are in a much better situation. It's ironic that our own laws screw up our own companies while helping the chinese because they ignore our laws.

Sorry for the rant, but this just pisses me off to no end. It's so god damned idiotic how patents hurt our economy and our innovation while everyone pretends that they are needed to sustain innovation.

@AdmiralRupert:

MMOs: Because we can't let the stupid people on the rest of the internet.

@Stormrider900: Yes.

He is full of rhetoric.

@L_K_M: That was a really good post.