Raph Koster's new book Postmortems is now available for purchase.
This first of three volumes is the beginnings of many of the essays and writings Koster has shared over the last several decades. It focuses specifically on games he has worked on, from LegendMUD and beyond, and is a compendium of design history, lessons learned, and anecdotes from the games industry. The foreword for the book is written by Richard Garriott.
Contents include:
- Early days, creating board games, and the lessons learned
- MUDs, including DikuMUDs design, administrative practices on LegendMUD, and the struggles on MUD governance
- The resource system, playerkilling, and evolution of the game economy model of Ultima Online
- Postmortems, design philosophy, and a design overview on Star Wars Galaxies
- The transition of MMOs
- Design diary and transcript of Andean Bird
- Tech architecture and postmortem of Metaplace
Here's an excerpt from the book discussing playerkilling with Ultimate Online:
A longer excerpt can be found here.
Raph Koster is a veteran game designer and creative executive who has worked at EA, Sony, and Disney as well as run his own company. The lead designer and director of massive titles such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, he’s also contributed writing, art, music, and programming to many other titles. He is the author of the classic book A Theory of Fun for Game Design. In 2012, he was named an Online Game Legend at the Game Developers Conference Online.
You can find the book on Amazon and other retailers.
