Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Koster's Laws Of Online Gaming Revisited

Posted by simoniker on from the MUDshead-revisited dept.

Thanks to F13.net for its article attempting a re-appraisal of the original 'laws of online gaming' document, as first posted by Raph Koster and others starting on October 9, 1998. The curmudgeonly analysis includes rebuttals of original laws such as "No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world" ("There's a very simple fix for this. Dump the treadmill, dump the numbers, and make gameplay fun"), and there's an equally tetchy rebuttal of the rebuttal at F13, suggesting: "Any amount of development time spent making the game more realistic or lifelike is wasted development time, stolen from useful tasks like making the game fun."

2 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Terrible Rebuttal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    See, Schild is a retard. People who have known him for longer than a month already know that and we stopped reading his stupidity.

  2. I'd just like to say... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    That I hate Koster for what he did to SWG. If any game could have been the dawn of a new era in MMOGs, this was it. The amount of non MMOG gamers it drew in because of the liscence *was* staggering.

    Now, it's gone from fun to bad to worse. They're banking on JTL saving it, but unless it plays like Microsoft's old Allegiance game it will get stale just as fast as the ground game. The mass exodus to the next crop of MMOGs will begin (Matrix, ME Online, EQ2, WOW, etc...).

    I find it a continual amazement that Lucasarts doesn't step in and say "What the hell are you doing to our franchise?". They've done more damage to the idea of Star Wars games than Republic, Force Commander, and Obi-Wan combined.