I finished reading both of his books earlier this year. Postmortems is worth its weight in gold; even when I disagreed with conclusions, the historical perspective was invaluable. The story of UO is interesting, where Koster tries to push a product that his players do not want, and once he had left, the UO team launches the “Trammel” server where there’s no ability to attack other players and the userbase doubles! LWers should probably read these chapters with Goodhart’s Law and the concept of legibility/Seeing Like a State in mind.
(You might also want to go find a copy of Star Wars Galaxies off ebay and try playing it on the SWGEmu servers, though I’d warn you that it hasn’t aged very well. Combat is almost non-functional and rubber-bandy. But seeing its crafting system in action is kinda worth it, if you’re interested in alternative MMO design. I put little weight in Koster’s attempts at social engineering, but very much admire his simulationist bent to other areas of game design. “Start with the Sim.”)
A Theory of Fun, however, isn’t worth your time. It’s a very casual overview of his theory with a side of culture war and several later chapters which are merely sermons about how important video games are. It was written long before we had the phrase “replication crisis” and cites a bunch of psychology from that time.
I finished reading both of his books earlier this year. Postmortems is worth its weight in gold; even when I disagreed with conclusions, the historical perspective was invaluable. The story of UO is interesting, where Koster tries to push a product that his players do not want, and once he had left, the UO team launches the “Trammel” server where there’s no ability to attack other players and the userbase doubles! LWers should probably read these chapters with Goodhart’s Law and the concept of legibility/Seeing Like a State in mind.
(You might also want to go find a copy of Star Wars Galaxies off ebay and try playing it on the SWGEmu servers, though I’d warn you that it hasn’t aged very well. Combat is almost non-functional and rubber-bandy. But seeing its crafting system in action is kinda worth it, if you’re interested in alternative MMO design. I put little weight in Koster’s attempts at social engineering, but very much admire his simulationist bent to other areas of game design. “Start with the Sim.”)
A Theory of Fun, however, isn’t worth your time. It’s a very casual overview of his theory with a side of culture war and several later chapters which are merely sermons about how important video games are. It was written long before we had the phrase “replication crisis” and cites a bunch of psychology from that time.