I'm pretty chuffed to learn that Metaplace, a games startup that I'm an advisor to — closed a new round of financing today, netting $6.7 million from their existing VCs and Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Metaplace was started by Raph Koster, who created Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, with the idea of democratizing the creation of virtual worlds and games inside them. — Read the rest

Deeplinking has collected the paper sketches that gave birth to Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, Abiword, mySociety, and others. Shown here, an early Twitter (stat.us) sketch, from Jack Dorsey's Flickr stream. My own contribution to the archiving of this stuff are my pics of Raph Koster's original, hand-drawn Ultima Online map. — Read the rest

The kid-centric online game Club Penguin (acquired by Disney last year) adds 500-1000 words a day to its list of forbidden chat-words in an effort to keep things clean. Wanna bet that kids come up with 2000-4000 new variant spellings a day? — Read the rest

The Technology Review has a great feature on Metaplace, a virtual world startup that aims to allow users to create tiny, individual multiplayer worlds that they can link together like homepages. I'm a huge fan of the founder, Raph Koster, who previously created Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and I love the idea of letting players shape their worlds in simple, easy-to-understand ways. — Read the rest

Steve Easterbrook, the CEO of McDonald's UK, says that video games cause obesity — not his nutritionally void, heavily sweetened, processed junk that's voraciously marketed to kids:

But he made special mention of the popularity of games – and said they have reduced the amount of time young people spend outdoors "burning off energy"…

"Then there's a lifestyle element: there's fewer green spaces and kids are sat home playing computer games on the TV when in the past they'd have been burning off energy outside."

Metaplace — a virtual world creation system that lets anyone make their own multiplayer games, link them and share them — has just launched, at the Techcrunch 40 event. Metaplace was created by Raph Koster, the architect of Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online — and the author of the incredible Theory of Fun. — Read the rest

Danah boyd's morning keynote at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference was called "Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life." Danah started with the premise that we treat techies as the people who understand technology best, but that maybe it's the naifs — kids, disenfranchised people, techno have-nots — who have the best insight into how technology should work. — Read the rest

In this funny G4 Attack of the Show skit, a couple of weasels in suits pitch several carpetbagger ideas for a new massively multiplayer game designed to milk maximum bucks from players, each funnier than the last: starting with Antiques Roadshow Online, the all-auction MMO. — Read the rest

Raph Koster has just uploaded the full, 62MB, 31,406-message archive of the seminal MUD-DEV list, the Ur-list where virtual world designers all started out, laying the groundwork for all the MMORPGs (like Second Life and World of Warcraft):

[I]it occurs to me that likely there are many readers who do not know why this matters.

The state of West Virginia is putting a Dance Dance Revolution game in every public school in order to stem the tide of childhood obesity:

The state, which plans to put the popular dancing video game in every one of its public schools, said on Wednesday research suggested that it helped put a halt to weight gain.

Master game designer Raph Koster has posted a great rumination on "Mudflation" — runaway inflation in virtual worlds. This is an old phenomenon that each game discovers anew as it nears senescence. I think that this has profound implications for in-game democracy — democracy requires that you play together for a long time, in order to establish civil society. — Read the rest

Areae is the just-launched multiplayer world startup from Raph Koster, the famed creator of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxy, and author of the classic "A Theory of Fun" (the "Understanding Comics" of gaming).

There's not much public about the game yet, though one of the investors has published this comment: "Areae sits at the intersection between Web 2.0 and MMOGs. — Read the rest

Brent sez, "Raph Koster (game designer of such great titles like Ultima Online and Star Wars: Galaxies) shares on his blog the vestiges of a game idea. The game involves flapping around the screen with a bird learning to fly." Raph also wrote the magnificent Theory of Fun, which does for games what Understanding Comics did for comics. — Read the rest

Master multiplayer game designer Raph Koster (author of A Theory of Fun) offers some insight into the life-cycle of gamers, running through a survey of the theory to date and offering some of his own insights:

I'm going to offer up just a few points built mostly on anecdotal evidence as regards these models.

Master game designer Raph Koster ponders the thinness of the role of the healer in massively multiplayer roleplaying games, and noodles around with ideas for a healer-centric game:

Picture an MMORPG just like the ones today, but everywhere you see combat, replace it with healing.

Raph Koster — lead on Ultima Online, creator of Star Wars Galaxies, Chief Creative Officer of Sony Online Entertainment, and author of A Theory of Fun (a kind of Understanding Comics for games) — has published an hilarious series of aphorisms under the title "What are the lessons of MMORPGs today?" — Read the rest

Raph Koster — designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, author of the brilliant A Theory of Fun, which does for games what Understanding Comics did for funnybooks — has posted his slides from a Korea Games Conference presentation called "The Destiny of Online Games." — Read the rest

The Game Developers' Conference is on in San Francisco, and Raph Koster — the guy behind Star Wars Galaxies and author of the magnificent book A Theory of Fun — gave the opening keynote. Alice was there and here are her notes:

Games are training us to find underlying patterns.

I reivewed Raph Koster's brilliant Theory of Fun book (think of it as an Understanding Comics for games) here before, and now I'm delighted to see that Raph's posted a tremendous, graphic-rich picture-book in PDF format detailing the notions from the game. — Read the rest

Raph Koster was creative lead and lead designer on Ultima Online and Ultima Online: The Second Age, and the creative director on Star Wars Galaxies — today, he's the Chief Creative Officer for Sony Entertainment (the division that does the video games). — Read the rest