Koster's Laws Of Online Gaming Revisited

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."

Comments

My rules of online-gaming

[byolinux]

a) At any one time, you'll be playing against at least three, and likely five stinking thirteen year old kids, who talk in l33tsp33k and haven't seen the outside for a while.

2) No matter what speed your connection, the game will be slow and laggy and therefore, annoying.

d) All the real games players are playing LAN games anyway.