Game designer and theorist. Lead designer of Ultima Online and creative director of Star Wars Galaxies, author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design, and founder of Playable Worlds. Has written about game design, virtual worlds and online communities at raphkoster.com since 1998.
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5 of Raph Koster's claims fit 5 mental models. Most often: Affordances and signifiers, Conservation of complexity, Design is how it works.
Some complexity cannot be removed, only moved; the question is who carries it, the user or the maker.
Their wordsUX is about clarity that hides complexity, and game design is about clarity that teaches complexity.
An interface should show what can be done and where, and give people a model of how it works.
Their wordsWhere UX tries to provide a likely false but useful mental model of the interior workings to the user, game design tries to guide the player towards a fairly accurate mental model.
Judge a design by what it does for the person using it, not only by how it looks.
Their wordsFundamentally, the game invites you to make guesses, but punishes you for them — and a missed guess doesn’t help you prune the logic space, only the trivia space.
Look at what people are rewarded for; it explains more behaviour than what they say, your own included.
Their wordsThe profit motive is incredibly powerful and will keep players engaging in your experience well past the point of actual enjoyment.
A longer horizon makes some problems solvable and some short-term wins look like what they are.
Their wordsIt’s repeated interactions that drive trust, you see, and we behave well because we expect to be treated well in the future.