Raph Koster Interview

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Written by BuckGB on February 2nd, 2004

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Q: In your opinion, to what degree are the MMORPGs of the early 21st century social experiments? And what have you learned about human nature from all the time you have spent studying and designing these virtual worlds so many of us call a second home?

A: I think anyone who doesn't think that MMOs are social experiments hasn't tried running one yet. It's not that you set out to create a social experiment-we don't have test plans for our subjects, formal hypotheses to prove, or anything like that. You set out to make a game, and quickly discover that you're suddenly a politician running a game the size of a city. You're suddenly a social architect worrying about issues you never had a clue about. Going in and thinking of it just from the side of game means that you're simply not considering all the aspects of design. It's a rude awakening.

The ultimate goal is still fun. But for example, when you look at some of the things that have been done in other games recently in the name of streamlining out the tedium and focusing on the fun, you often find that the stickiness or the community got streamlined out as well. There's interactions there that aren't necessarily understood by any of us.

I've learned a lot about human nature, but it's been the hard way, empirically, by messing up and making big mistakes that affect thousands of people. Some of it isn't intuitive at all. That's why I've been reading more and more in psychology and anthropology and sociology; if you're dealing with people, then it just makes sense. Game design is only one facet of online world design, frankly. Those of us who sound all high-falutin' and academic when we talk about it aren't chasing after that stuff just because we like it (I actually kind of hate some of it-economics textbooks get pretty dry!). We're chasing after it by necessity. We need to understand those things if we're going to provide better experiences for you the player.

And the bottom line is, that's what it's all about, right?

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