Raph Koster

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Koster at the Web 2.0 conference in 2005

Raphael "Raph" Koster (born September 7, 1971 ) is an American designer of computer games , author and musician . He is best known internationally for his work as lead designer for the MMORPG Ultima Online and was the creative director of Star Wars Galaxies . He is currently the President of Areae, Inc.

Life

Raph Koster had a strong affinity for computer games very early on and, together with friends, developed his own games for Atari and C64 computers , which he sold to his classmates. They called their "company" Protocom . Koster was in sixth or seventh grade at the time. He also developed his own board games or adapted computer games to board games that he played with his schoolmates during breaks. He got his access to role-playing games through the red Dungeons & Dragons Box, which he received as a birthday present.

Koster spent the following years with his mother, who worked for UNICEF and was separated from her husband after a divorce. Because of their job, they changed their place of residence several times. Raph lived in exotic places like Peru , Barbados or Haiti , but visited his father in Tennessee and Florida during the summer months . As a result, in his own opinion, he missed the Nintendo period and concentrated more on writing, although he did not completely give up gaming.

Koster attended Washington College in Chestertown , Maryland, and earned his bachelor's degrees in English (for creative writing ) and Spanish in 1992 . There he began to be more interested in games, started with pen & paper role-playing and started a small email role-playing game.

After graduating in 1992, college friends took him to multi-user dungeon games (MUDs) to keep in touch. Together with his wife Kristen, he initially mainly developed content for LegendMUD , a MUD that was started by Sherry Menton (basic idea and topic) and Rick Delashmit as the first implementor (comparable to administrators). As a result, Raph Koster and his wife also became implementors and took over the project entirely in 1994 when Sherry Menton and Rick Delashmit left LegendMUD. Koster appeared there as Ptah .

In 1995 he earned a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and was employed by Origin Systems as Lead Designer of Ultima Online. He was subsequently also the lead designer of Ultima Online: The Second Age and Ultima Online Live and an unknown and deleted title. In 2000 he moved to Verant Interactive in Austin ( Texas ), where he developed Star Wars Galaxies as Creative Director .

Raph Koster was promoted to Chief Creative Officer at Sony Online Entertainment in 2003 after the release of Star Wars Galaxies and was primarily responsible for business development from San Diego . He left the company in 2006 to pursue his own projects: "something indie ... something that is [hopefully] disruptive and different and not games as usual." In December 2006, Areae Inc. was founded , of which he is currently president .

Raph Koster is a member of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), ASCAP and Omicron Delta Kappa . He is also a frequent speaker at conferences for the MMOG and games industry, such as the GDC , DICE State of Play and the largest computer and video game fair E3 in Los Angeles . He lives in San Diego with his wife Kristen and has a daughter and a son.

Design position

Raph Koster's position in design is based on the worldy (also known as sandbox ) design approach, in which the game world or game content is dynamically generated from a number of variables that can be manipulated by players. This simulative structure of a game world can be illustrated with the Infamous Dragon Example . In contrast to other approaches (e.g. directed content ), for example a behavior or sequence is not specified directly, but results from the interaction of variables and the resulting instructions.

Infamous Dragon Example Every creature in the game is defined by its needs. For example, a dragon needs a large amount of meat to survive and will also look for gold (if it has found any, it should bring it back to the nest). In the case of application, the kite would have a nest and then search for food in larger circles around it. Should the players exterminate the game in this region, the dragon would search larger areas and eventually attack a nearby town to collect food. For their part, the players could solve the problem by feeding the kite (for example by leading a herd of game into the kite's nest) so that the kite no longer has to fly that far and thus spares the villages. Alternatively, they could also slay the dragon (to get its gold, for example). This is an example of how a simulative design can result in a more dynamic environment.

In this example, indications such as hunger are simple variables whose values ​​decrease over time. If the dragon encounters objects that have the property meat , the hunger value is replenished by a certain amount, which leads to a programmed behavior change (for example, to go looking for gold now). Once the dragon has found a certain amount of objects that have the property gold , this leads to a change in behavior that causes the dragon to return to its nest.

In addition to these approaches, which were partially implemented in Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies , Raph Koster places a focus on social interaction. So he developed the first guild system for Ultima Online (system for organizing player associations), which has become a general standard for MMORPGs . In Star Wars Galaxies, one of the main focuses was the establishment of player cities and peaceful, social forms of play.

Trivia

  • Raph Koster did not go to school for three months during his time in Barbados, as he probably had a slight depression. The doctor prescribed vitamins and sunshine. "Kinda ruined my high school transcript."
  • He's never got a ticket (not because he's a particularly good driver, but because he's mostly driven)
  • He is a good runner and held the hurdles record at his school.
  • Previously raised rodents: hamsters and gerbils in Alabama. He had so many that the black animals with the white ribbons on their paws could be had anywhere in the area.

Games

  • LegendMUD (implementor)
  • Ultima Online (lead designer; Origin Systems 1997)
  • Ultima Online: The Second Age (Lead designer; Origin Systems 1998)
  • Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided (Creative Director; Verant Interactive 2003)
    • Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed (Creative Consultant; Sony Online Entertainment 2004)
    • Star Wars Galaxies: The Total Experience (Creative Consultant; Sony Online Entertainment 2005)
  • EverQuest II (chief creative officer; Sony Online Entertainment 2004)
    • EverQuest II: Desert of Flames (Chief Creative Officer; Sony Online Entertainment 2005)
    • EverQuest II: Kingdom of Sky (Chief Creative Officer; Sony Online Entertainment 2005)
  • Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade (Chief Creative Officer and Editor ; Sony Online Entertainment 2005)
  • GripShift (chief creative officer; Sony Online Entertainment 2005)
  • Frantix (chief creative officer; Sony Online Entertainment 2005)
  • Champions: Return to Arms (Chief Creative Officer; Sony Online Entertainment 2005)
  • Field Commander (Chief Creative Officer; Sony Online Entertainment 2006)

Discography

  • After the Flood (1999)

bibliography

Awards

credentials

Web links

Interviews

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ areae.net ( Memento from January 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ www.stratics.com/content/exclusives/general/raph_koster.php ( Memento from July 23, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ raphkoster.com 2006/07/01
  4. ↑ Infamous Dragon Example
  5. ↑ raphkoster.com
  6. ↑ The 5 Things you don't know about me
personal data
SURNAME Koster, Raph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Koster, Raphael (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer game designer, writer, and musician
DATE OF BIRTH 7th September 1971