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About Raph Koster

Raph Koster is a virtual world game designer. While studying for his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, which he completed in 1995, whose thesis was a poetry collection entitled Housebuilding, he was awarded a string of awards for his LegendMUD project, one of the internet's longest-running Multi-User Dungeons and Dragons game.

He is Chief Creative Officer for his game Untold Legends, which was the third highest-selling Playstation Portable game of all time. His book publications include A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2004), "Declaring the Rights of Players" in The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (Salen & Zimmermann, eds.) (2006), "Grand Theft Education" in Harper's Magazine (2006), and A Grammar of Gameplay (2006).

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Personal Website

Articles by Raph Koster

Wednesday 10th March

Virtual worlds: disappearance through pervasiveness

Raph Koster, 10 March 2010

Remember Second Life? There was a time when everyone was moving in. But where did those worlds go? Social games – indeed, much of the social web that is not a "game", like Facebook itself – have taken on core characteristics of Virtual Worlds without needing some of their more head-turning characteristics. Raph Koster, a designer of virtual worlds, explains that Virtual Worlds only appear to have disappeared because they are now everywhere.