design 8
- A game is a machine built around uncertainty.
- Lavish feedback wrapped around no real problem is shallow entertainment at best and exploitation at worst.
Raph Koster
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.
Raph Koster did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
What Raph Koster says most about
video games 6
- A game is a machine built around uncertainty.
- A puzzle that invites guessing and then punishes wrong guesses stops the player learning the very method it could have taught.
Addiction 3
- A profit motive inside a game holds players there long past the point where they are still enjoying it.
- Free-to-play games use the same techniques as gambling machines in order to maximise what players spend and how long they stay.
education 2
- People learn best when the problem in front of them is just past the edge of what they can already do.
- A puzzle whose categories can only be seen by the broadly educated is elitist by construction.
social media 2
- Downvotes and other negative-reputation systems make online behaviour worse rather than better.
- Social media designers routinely ignore what online-community design already established decades ago.