Raph Koster (previously) is a games design legend, the designer behind such classics as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, a consistently thoughtful and smart theorist of games, and the author of A Theory of Fun, the best book I've ever read about games and gaming.

Game designer Raph Koster is a polymath. A legendary game-designer (Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, etc), author of one of the seminal texts on game design (A Theory of Fun), visual artist, musician -- and poet.

Alice from the Wonderland blog is at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference and she blogged her extensive notes from Raph "Theory of Fun" Koster's amazing talk on game design's lessons for web applications. Raph took us through what Amazon would look like if it was designed to maximize fun. — Read the rest

Raph Koster is one of the world's most celebrated game designers, responsible for the design of Ultima Online, CCO of Sony during the Star Wars Galaxies era, and author of the classic Theory of Fun. Ever year, Raph gives a barn-raising/barn-burning speech at the Game Developer's Conference, one of the don't-miss moments of the conference. — Read the rest

That tell-tale wedding of relentless hostility and ethical affectation is a peculiar youth subculture spilling out into the open web. Get ready for more of it.

I sat down for an interview with the LA Times's Hero Complex to talk about my book In Real Life (I'm touring it now: Chicago tomorrow, then Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Warsaw, London…), and found myself giving a pretty good account of why games are art, and how the art of games works:

Raph "Theory of Fun" Koster has a wonderful, readable, theory-rich article that helps unpick the discussion about when a game is a clone of another game, when it's a skin, when it's a variant, and when it's a new game.

As mentioned earlier, the new edition of A Theory of Fun For Game Design by Raph Koster ships today — with updated text and color illustrations. It's an absolutely indispensable book about the phenomenon of fun, full of mind-blowing and very applicable insights into games, from a legendary designer (Koster led the design of Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online, among other accomplishments). — Read the rest

Hard to believe it's been ten years since the initial release of Raph Koster's indispensable A Theory of Fun for Game Design, a book that does for game-design what Understanding Comics did for sequential art.

Koster and O'Reilly have produced a tenth anniversary edition, which updates all the interior art (all-color, now!), — Read the rest

Back from the Games Developers' Conference in San Francisco, Raph Koster weighs in on the perennial debate about what makes a game, starting with his own classic formulation, "Playing a game is the act of solving statistically varied challenge situations presented by an opponent who may or may not be algorithmic within a framework that is a defined systemic model." — Read the rest

Raph Koster's on a tear these days on the theory and practice of game design. Today, it's a fab little sermonette on why it's not right to sneer at data-driven, "free-to-play" games that use extensive instrumentation to make games that captivate players' attention without a lot of flair or imagination. — Read the rest

Raph Koster, who has many critical insights on game design, has a great new essay on his blog called "Making games more cheaply," which closes with this statement that applies to practically every form of digital media extant, and may just be the secret to success in the 21st century:

Embrace prototyping.

Yesterday's Game Developer Conference in San Francisco saw a smashing presentation from game-design legend Raph Koster, entitled, "Social Mechanics: The Engines Behind Everything Multiplayer." Alice from the Wonderland Blog took copious notes, and Raph has uploaded his slides.

#5: Tournaments: bracketing users.

Reflecting on the VentureBeat report on big media companies' massively multiplayer online games for kids at the NYC Toy Fair, veteran game designer and entrepreneur Raph Koster points out that "kids worlds and media-driven worlds are probably more important than most all the AAA MMOs released 2007 to today. — Read the rest

I'm about to do an in-game chat with Metaplace, the online world started by Raph Koster — creator of Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online. It starts at 0600h Pacific/0900h Eastern/1300h UK. You can get online through the embed above.

(Disclosure: I am an unpaid advisor to Metaplace)

Update: We're done! — Read the rest

Learning generates a brain reward:

This preference for knowledge about the future was intimately linked to the monkeys' desire for water. The same neurons in the middle of their brains signalled their expectations of both rewards – the watery prizes and knowledge about them.

Raph Koster makes a pretty good case for 1971 being the perfect year to be born geek. I'm biased (born: July 17, 1971), of course:

* It meant I got to see Star Wars in the theater, 13 times, at age 8 and 9, exactly when it would overwhelm my sense of wonder.

Recently, the spreadsheets-in-space game EVE Online was rocked by a huge scandal — one of the largest virtual "corporations" in the game was infiltrated and toppled through in-game espionage. Much phosphor has been spilled over this, but master game designer Raph Koster has the smartest analysis I've seen — explaining how this scandal was inherent to the nature of what made the game fun. — Read the rest

On a gamer forum, a vigorous discussion about whether it's fair for employers to discriminate against World of Warcraft players when hiring, on the grounds that WoW players are never fully out of the game. A surprising number of players agree with this proposition. — Read the rest

Raph Koster's Metaplace is offering the first 250 Offworld readers a chance to play around with the company's web-embeddable virtual meta-world.

Brandon has more:

Metaplace is also jumping ahead of the pack in modeling the software's Terms of Service around his 2000 manifesto "Declaring the Rights of Players", which gives creators "freedom of expression, ownership, including earning money & running their own world, privacy," and the ability to develop their own individual terms of service.