Postmortems: Selected Essays Volume One

by Raph Koster, Richard Garriott de Cayeux (Foreword)

Few game designers have shared as many lessons learned as Raph Koster. In a quarter-century of writings and talks, he has offered up game design lessons, online community theories, and candid self-evaluation. This first volume of a three-book set of selected essays collects previously written postmortems and many brand new pieces. They are accompanied by historical material such as posts written for players, chat logs, speeches, design sketches, and more. The result is an inspiring historical look back at the development of virtual worlds. These are the stories behind Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, the story of the early art game Andean Bird and the story of the ambitious project Metaplace that aimed to build the Metaverse,

Genres: Game Design, Nonfiction, Games, Technology, Design

702 pages, Paperback

Published June 26, 2018

About the author

Raph Koster is a veteran game designer who has been professionally credited in almost every area of the game industry. He's been the lead designer and director of massive titles such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies; and he's contributed writing, art, soundtrack music, and programming to many more titles ranging from Facebook games to single-player titles for handheld consoles.

Koster is widely recognized as one of the world's top thinkers about game design, and is an in-demand speaker at conferences all over the world. In 2012, he was named an Online Game Legend at the Game Developers Conference Online. Visit his blog at www.raphkoster.com.

Reviews

[Shahriar Shahrabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a lot of fun reading this! As an indie developer focused on small scope hyper polished products, the world of HUDs and MMORPGS was completely foreign to me. This book gave me a lot of fascinating perspectives on the problems they deal with! My main problem with the book is the polish of it itself. It reads more like series of blog posts curated and touched up to tell a narrative which keeps the flow of the content authentic to the historical development of virtual worlds (or at least it feels that way). However this also means information repeats itself and generally as a non historian who is here for the thoughts and the design exploration, it felt like the book could have been shorter and segments put on a different order better suited for that

[Bugzmanov]

No rating as I'm giving up after reading the first half.
The book might be perfect if you have played the games being discussed or if you're deep into game design.

[Yijia Chen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never thought seriously about games and their importance. This book, however, taught me the connection between games and mathematics, culture, identity. Gonna build a game myself soon.

[Julien · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is difficult to give an opinion on Postmortems, because it's not really a book: it's a collection of articles and essays on various themes. As such, it is quite horrible to read as you would read a book, but as reference material to open and research on specific topics, it is quite fantastic.