Raph Koster
Game designer; wrote A Theory of Fun for Game Design and worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.
Raph Koster did not write this page. What is this?
It collects the places they publish and what they have said there, each linked to the source. They have no account here. Is this you? Claim it, correct it, or ask us to remove it from ppll.
Where they publish
Blog raphkoster.com His blog on game design, virtual worlds and their economics. Has a feed.
Recent
- Recommended posts, 2017-2025 26 Nov 2025 It’s been over five years since the last time I gathered up recommended posts in one place and added them to the menu above. I figured I was due. As usual this will include talks and interviews as well as articles. Just…
- Looking back at a pandemic simulator 16 Nov 2025 It’s been six years now since the early days of the Covid pandemic. People who were paying super close attention started hearing rumors about something going on in China towards the end of 2019 — my earliest posts about…
- Game design is simple, actually 3 Nov 2025 So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design. One: Fun There are a lot of things people call “fun.” But most of them are not useful for getting bett…
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- Stars Reach visual upgrades 29 Oct 2025 For months now, we have been working on a big overhaul to the visuals in Stars Reach. This has involved redoing most of the shaders in the entire game, and going back and retouching every asset. We started by redoing al…
- New stuff on the site 25 Oct 2025 I really have been neglecting the blog lately. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been adding content to the site all along. I figured it might not hurt to do a little summary of items that have been added over the last ye…
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 18 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Lavish feedback wrapped around no real problem is shallow entertainment at best and exploitation at worst.
At minimum you’re making shallow entertainment. At worst, you are building exploitative entertainment.
Game design is simple, actually Said 3 Nov 2025
People learn best when the problem in front of them is just past the edge of what they can already do.
People learn best when the problem they are tackling is right past the edge of what they can do.
Game design is simple, actually Said 3 Nov 2025
A game is a machine built around uncertainty.
Games are machines built around uncertainty.
Game design is simple, actually Said 3 Nov 2025
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A puzzle that invites guessing and then punishes wrong guesses stops the player learning the very method it could have taught.
Fundamentally, the game invites you to make guesses, but punishes you for them — and a missed guess doesn’t help you prune the logic space, only the trivia space.
Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad Said 2 Sept 2023
A puzzle whose categories can only be seen by the broadly educated is elitist by construction.
But it’s fundamentally elitist — it basically requires you to have a broad education to find the categories in the first place.
Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad Said 2 Sept 2023
A service business in games rests entirely on retention: a genre that cannot hold people across sessions cannot be sold as a service.
There is no ongoing service without retention.
What drives retention Said 30 Jan 2019
A profit motive inside a game holds players there long past the point where they are still enjoying it.
The profit motive is incredibly powerful and will keep players engaging in your experience well past the point of actual enjoyment.
What drives retention Said 30 Jan 2019
Designing a game imprints behaviour on the people who play it, including behaviour the designer never intended to teach.
know in your bones that game design is a powerful way of imprinting behaviors on people, and that it is entirely possible to imprint behaviors you didn’t want.
Games affecting people Said 30 Jun 2015
Denying that games can affect the people who play them is a way of calling games a lesser medium.
Saying games can’t affect people is to denigrate them.
Games affecting people Said 30 Jun 2015
User-interface design and game design are opposites: one takes problems away from the person using it, the other hands problems to them.
Short form: UX design is about removing problems from the user. Game design is about giving problems to the user.
Game design vs UX design Said 29 Jun 2015
Good interface design uses clarity to hide complexity; good game design uses clarity to teach it.
UX is about clarity that hides complexity, and game design is about clarity that teaches complexity.
Game design vs UX design Said 29 Jun 2015
An interface should give the user a useful mental model even if it is false, while a game should give the player an accurate model of its own machinery.
Where UX tries to provide a likely false but useful mental model of the interior workings to the user, game design tries to guide the player towards a fairly accurate mental model.
Game design vs UX design Said 29 Jun 2015
Downvotes and other negative-reputation systems make online behaviour worse rather than better.
Downvoting and other forms of negative feedback reputation systems, lead to bad social behavior.
Social media is broken Said 13 Nov 2014
People behave well towards each other where they expect to meet again; trust is a product of repeated interaction, not of identity.
It’s repeated interactions that drive trust, you see, and we behave well because we expect to be treated well in the future.
Social media is broken Said 13 Nov 2014
The bigger a forum gets, the worse behaviour gets, because people come to care only about their standing inside a small subgroup.
The bigger the forum, the worse behavior problems get, as people splinter into smaller social groups, and only care about their reputations within that group.
Social media is broken Said 13 Nov 2014
Social media designers routinely ignore what online-community design already established decades ago.
This matters because all of these lessons, which are well-established across many fields, are routinely ignored by social media designers.
Social media is broken Said 13 Nov 2014
Free-to-play games use the same techniques as gambling machines in order to maximise what players spend and how long they stay.
In the sense that social games make use of many of the same techniques as gambling games do in order to maximize financial spend and retention, yes.
Social games vs gambling Said 3 Jul 2013
A slot machine triggers the brain’s learning and curiosity pathways while teaching nothing, and that one-way exchange is what makes it contemptuous of the player.
Slot machines don’t teach you anything; they trigger the learning and curiosity pathways without actually giving you a benefit in return.
Social games vs gambling Said 3 Jul 2013
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Feed
As its own page →Hiding
26 November 2025
16 November 2025
3 November 2025
From one piece Game design is simple, actually 3 beliefs · raphkoster.com
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korrents.com
A game is a machine built around uncertainty.Their words
Games are machines built around uncertainty.
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korrents.com
People learn best when the problem in front of them is just past the edge of what they can already do.Their words
People learn best when the problem they are tackling is right past the edge of what they can do.
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korrents.com
Lavish feedback wrapped around no real problem is shallow entertainment at best and exploitation at worst.Their words
At minimum you’re making shallow entertainment. At worst, you are building exploitative entertainment.
29 October 2025
25 October 2025
Nothing matches.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
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