A Grammer of Gameplay - Koster

[The Hiram Key]

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php

Hopefully there will be lots of quotes and examples about just how fucking good SWG was....sorry.. IS !!!

You GO with your bad self there Raph.

[Slide]

Raph Koster is up there with John Romero as a god of game design.

The first chapter in his book was to be called "Fun", but he scrapped it as it wasn't important to games. It has been tentatively replaced with a chapter called "The theory of divergent populaces, and the sociological effect of displacement theory on them."

[venom]

Direct link.

[drak1337]

he looks like a wombat, lol.

[Neric]

What a joke! There is a guy talking about fun in games and his own game/product didn't contain any fun at all.

Anyways, a short glance at the list of content from his first book reveals that it is simply worthless. The work of some random fool spilling out what he thinks is right and what he thinks is wrong and how he thinks things should be. Without a doubt I could write a book that's just as good and it would probably have a 50% chance to be better. The same goes for all other readers of this board.

Now after the guy got kicked from SoE he need cash, so he writes another piece of worthless trash in the hope to make a few bucks on it and use it as advertisement for a new job.

Once again, nobody at SoE knows how online games really work and why they can be fun and why they can be so addictive. Therefore chances that anyone of their guys hits on the truth are slim and probably next to non existant.

[Weritech]

Originally Posted by Slide

Raph Koster is up there with John Romero as a god of game design.

The first chapter in his book was to be called "Fun", but he scrapped it as it wasn't important to games. It has been tentatively replaced with a chapter called "The theory of divergent populaces, and the sociological effect of displacement theory on them."

Dead on.

That sums up everything anyone needs to know about the guy. I wasted my time reading a whole mess of his stuff about 5 years ago. Don't make the same mistake.

[tjac]

Originally Posted by drak1337

he looks like a wombat, lol.

some other possibilities:

[Neric]

Key point one to understand MMORPGs:

Everquest was a game with almost zero fun! Still it was very successful. Fun is not a required element to be successful.

[Itzena]

Originally Posted by drak1337

he looks like a wombat, lol.

Winner of the thread, right here.

[WarderX]

Originally Posted by Neric

Key point one to understand MMORPGs:

Everquest was a game with almost zero fun! Still it was very successful. Fun is not a required element to be successful.

Everquest was fun, just in different ways compared to warcraft.

EQ was funner when dealing with other people, for example.
EQ was funner to explore, funner in a way that 'more-risk = more fun'
etc..

PS, "grammar" is spelt with two a's, no a-e

[Neric]

EQ gameplay wasn't even close to being fun. What you see as "fun" was when you finally managed to get through a grind or get a nice reward or accomplished something that others failed to do. For a marathon runner, running isn't fun. Fun is when he reaches the goal, the endorphines kick in and he wins a medal on top of it. EQ players are all undercover marathon runners who are either too fat or too lazy to leave the house. If you don't believe me, how about you resubscribe and play another char to lvl 70 and 1500 AAs...

Anyways, back to Koster. I have spend my extremely valuable time to browse through some of the stuff on his webpage and I have to correct my opinion him. The guy isn't a complete idiot and he certainly spend some time on thinking about games in general. Maybe not as long as I did, but long enough to come to non-trivial conclusions. He is definitely wrong in many areas (like game success states), but he also has some good points (like trivial games don't challenge people).

I see him as a guy whose opinion I can respect at least and it would certainly be interesting to hang out with him and talk about games and why he failed to implement his own ideas to the games he was responsible for.

[Carly01]

Originally Posted by Neric

Key point one to understand MMORPGs:

Everquest was a game with almost zero fun! Still it was very successful. Fun is not a required element to be successful.

WTF are you talking about. Dumbass...

[tad10]

"Fun" is not a single concept. There is the "fun" of getting drunk with friends. There is the "fun" of spending a saturday evening doing nothing but watching a favorite DVD, alone or with your significant other while munching on crappy microwave popcorn. This are less exhausting forms of fun. There is also the "fun" of doing something dangerous - say driving a car at 90 mph down a deserted stretch of highway. There is also the "fun" of doing something challenging and different - say scuba-diving for the first time.

MMO's (including EQ) are (were) popular because they combine these different forms of "fun" in one nifty electronic package - there's social fun - going blue with your mates in guildchat. There's favorite DVD fun - running an instance, pvping in AB or etc that you're very familiar with just for the hell of it. There's challenge fun - e.g. high-end raiding of new content.

However, there are also things that are not "fun" in MMO's but are more like "work" - something you have to do, but don't reallly want to - like running MC or endless AV.

If it isn't fun an MMO can't last.

Edited for typos

[Soygen]

Originally Posted by Neric

Key point one to understand MMORPGs:

Everquest was a game with almost zero fun! Still it was very successful. Fun is not a required element to be successful.

While I disagree that EQ had almost zero fun(Granted, it did have a lot of things that were not fun at all, in design), I have to say this makes me laugh at you. You played, for who knows how long, something you didn't think was fun? What's wrong with you? Maybe you should rephrase that or something, so you don't look like some idiot who plays games they don't even find fun.

[Kilaara]

Why did ppl stay several month in zones like Lower Guk or Sebilis? I was there. It was fun ( most of the time ) to be there.

Compare this to WoW. Nobody would have fun ( or do it in any way ) making Strat 6 hours a day for 5 month.

The construct of "Camping" in a Zone has some adventages ( community ... ) and some disadventages.

In the days of Everquest the community was way better than in WoW cause of the better communication.

I miss the form of zonewide ..... communication with everyone.