The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Game development

Raph Koster

raphkoster.com

Game designer, author, speaker

Game developmentGamingEssays / personal

’00’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
2,577 from 29 Aug 1998 to 26 Nov 2025
Posting
now and then (3 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://www.raphkoster.com/feed/

Latest

November 2025

  1. Recommended posts, 2017-2025
  2. Looking back at a pandemic simulator
  3. Game design is simple, actually

October 2025

  1. Stars Reach visual upgrades
  2. New stuff on the site
  3. Site updates

June 2025

  1. Stars Reach doesn’t look like you remember

March 2025

  1. One week of Stars Reach Kickstarter

February 2025

  1. STARS REACH Kickstarter funded in 1 hour
  2. STARS REACH Kickstarter is live now

December 2024

  1. Flooding Gaiamar

August 2024

  1. Old movement stuff for STARS REACH
  2. The first players land in Stars Reach
  3. The neverending griefing discussion

July 2024

  1. Using a vision exercise to define what Stars Reach is about
  2. SR Pillars three: the vibe!
  3. SR Pillars Part 2: Easy Surface, Much Depth
  4. Stars Reach Pillars
  5. Wishlist STARS REACH and its living world

June 2024

  1. Announcing Stars Reach

March 2024

  1. GDC talk: Revisiting Fun

September 2023

  1. Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad

September 2022

  1. Ultima Online’s 25th anniversary
  2. Sandbox vs themepark

August 2022

  1. New paper applies predictive processing to “what is fun?”

June 2022

  1. GLS 2022 Keynote posted

October 2021

  1. Ownership: How Virtual Worlds Work, part 5
  2. Object Behaviors: How Virtual Worlds Work part 4
  3. Digital Objects: How Virtual Worlds Work part 3
  4. Building the Metaverse session

September 2021

  1. How Virtual Worlds Work, part two
  2. How Virtual Worlds Work, part one
  3. But First, the Game
  4. Revealing Playable Worlds technology
  5. Online world or metaverse?

April 2021

  1. Thinking long-term
  2. Designing for Social Play
  3. Player-driven economies

March 2021

  1. The Future of Online Worlds

February 2019

  1. Best practices for community engagement

January 2019

  1. What drives retention

November 2018

  1. Mailbag: Parts of an MMO

September 2018

  1. Micael Priest

July 2018

  1. GameCamp and Tabletop talks now up

June 2018

  1. POSTMORTEMS is out

May 2018

  1. New book POSTMORTEMS
  2. UOForever livestream

March 2018

  1. GDC18 videos
  2. UO postmortem from GDC2018
  3. The Trust Spectrum
  4. My GDC schedule

February 2018

  1. Favorite game designs from 2017
  2. Why I loved “Edith Finch”
  3. My AAAI Workshop talk on game depth

January 2018

  1. The cost of games
  2. 2017 Year in Review

November 2017

  1. Some current game economics
  2. My GameUX Summit keynote: (Dis)Assembling Games

September 2017

  1. Ultima Online’s influence
  2. Video of UO 20th
  3. Ultima Online is Twenty
  4. What old tennis players teach us

August 2017

  1. Consent systems
  2. Slides for my FDG17 talk on Reconciling Games
  3. Simple Maps improvements
  4. The Sunday Poem: Made of Moon

July 2017

  1. SDCC Game Creator Connection
  2. Mailbag: Action Combat

June 2017

  1. The Internet as existential threat
  2. The best posts of the last five years

May 2017

  1. Microvision emulator release

April 2017

  1. Podcast with Keith Burgun
  2. Recent videos & interviews

March 2017

  1. Commentary on “Still Logged In”
  2. Video of my GDC talk “Still Logged In”
  3. Slides for “Still Logged In,” my GDC talk

February 2017

  1. Some updates

October 2016

  1. My UAH talk: Digital Bards

September 2016

  1. A fish tank game interview with Markee Dragon
  2. My AGC talk on Retention and Systems Math
  3. The Sunday Song: World Trade Center

August 2016

  1. Upcoming talk: Systems Design for Retention

July 2016

  1. A Poke-roundup
  2. I really did mean “MMO”
  3. AR is an MMO

May 2016

  1. The Limits of Formalism, my talk from BIRS
  2. My Cycle of Life talk from Helsinki

March 2016

  1. Slides for my GDC Flashbackward segment
  2. Books on writing
  3. GDC and Flash Backward

December 2015

  1. A Sunday Poems update

November 2015

  1. Video: Teaching to Fish (Sweden Game Conference)
  2. My new book: Sunday Poems

September 2015

  1. Teaching to Fish: Sweden Game Conference
  2. PAXDev Game Grammar talk

August 2015

  1. Off to PAX

July 2015

  1. MMORPG.com interview

June 2015

  1. Games affecting people
  2. Game design vs UX design
  3. Games vs Sports
  4. Some thoughts on recent industry events
  5. Online Game Pioneers at Work
  6. An Industry Lifecycle

April 2015

  1. Did Star Wars Galaxies Fail?
  2. Designing a Living Society in SWG, part two
  3. Designing a Living Society in SWG, part one
  4. SWG’s Dynamic World
  5. A Jedi Saga
  6. Star Wars Galaxies Temporary Enemy Flagging

March 2015

  1. Video of “Community Management in the Culture Wars”
  2. Jackpot Trivia
  3. GDC: Community Management in the Culture Wars

February 2015

  1. The Game Design section
  2. A Career: GameDay Peru talk

January 2015

  1. Working on Crowfall!
  2. High Windows

December 2014

  1. RIP, Ralph Baer
  2. Practicing the creativity habit
  3. GDCNext Video: Practical Creativity

November 2014

  1. GDCNext: Indie Grassroots Marketing video
  2. Ten Years of World of Warcraft
  3. Yiynova MVP22U v3 review: 22 inch Cintiq alternative
  4. Social media is broken
  5. GDCNext 2014: Practical Creativity slides

October 2014

  1. Gamasutra on the indie economics talk

September 2014

  1. Indiecade: A conversation on indie economics
  2. Speaking on “Practical Creativity”
  3. The Sunday Poem: London Squall
  4. What makes a game last a generation?
  5. Open letter to the gaming community

August 2014

  1. Random UO anecdote #2
  2. Wikipedia is a game
  3. Wikimania 2014 in London

July 2014

  1. When is a Clone
  2. Interactive Mountain
  3. Interactivity

June 2014

  1. Privateer Online
  2. How to build the scary future today

May 2014

  1. Monkey-X
  2. The Sunday Poem: Afternoon Joggers
  3. The Financial Future of Game Developers
  4. Is this the future?
  5. 2048: Game Design Theory Edition

April 2014

  1. GDC Next Call for Papers
  2. On SiriusXM tomorrow!

March 2014

  1. Musings on the Oculus sale
  2. GDC: Building game retention tips
  3. A New Formalism: Critical Proximity talk
  4. Me at GDC 2014
  5. Mailbag: breaking in (again)

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