Raph Koster has some big news: he has just published a new book, entitled Postmortems, which contains articles, stories, and essays about his career in the gaming industry and the various titles he has worked on over the years.

This is the first volume of a projected three that gather together many of the essays and writings that I have been sharing on this blog over the last several decades. This book focuses specifically on games I have worked on, from LegendMUD up through social games, and is a book of design history, lessons learned, and anecdotes. Richard Garriott was kind enough to write a foreword for the book.

It’s not a memoir or tell-all; the focus is on game design and game history. There’s still nowhere near enough material out there in print covering things like the history and evolution of online worlds (MUDs especially), in-depth dives into decisions made in games by the people who made them, and detailed breakdowns of how they worked. So I hope that this will be useful to scholars and designers, and that players might find it a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes. Just don’t expect salacious stories and secrets.

…

The contents:

• Early Days, which covers my apprenticeship creating board games as a kid, and the lessons I learned that way.
• MUDs, which has design articles about DikuMUDs, design and administrative practices material on LegendMUD, a lengthy article on the struggles with MUD governance that we went through back then, and even samples from what MUDding was like (for the younger folks out there!).
• Ultima Online, including the resource system, playerkilling, the evolution of the game economy model, “A Story About a Tree” and the aftermath, and more.
• Star Wars Galaxies, including the whole postmortem series, a new overall design overview, and even materials I wrote to the players explaining our design philosophy. Oh, and of course, a new piece on the NGE.
• Transitions, a section on the way in which MMOs changed and the impact they left on players over the course of the 2000s.
• Andean Bird, the little art game I made back in the mid-2000s, with design diary and a transcript of the popular “Influences” speech that resulted.
• Metaplace, which hopefully answers the lingering question “what was it?” once and for all, and covers not only the tech architecture but also has a frank postmortem of why it didn’t work. I also go into the social games we made afterwards, with some special love for My Vineyard.

 

If you follow Koster on Twitter, he’s been sharing excerpts from the book there.

I was fortunate to be sent an advance copy, which I’ve been reading through as time permits. And while I’ll do a full review in due time, here’s my initial thoughts. Postmortems is, as you might expect, a very engaging read; Koster is a masterful storyteller, and the book grabs you very quickly and keeps you moving forward through the history of his games, from the ones he designed in childhood through to the MMORPGs he is most well-known for. It’s not salacious or controversial; the book delivers on the goal of being an analysis of each game in turn, and where Koster verges into memory and anecdote, he tends to keep to the positive; he speaks warmly of his childhood in Lima, for example, and there’s a fondness to his recollections of individuals he crossed path with during his MUDding days.

Currently, Postmortems is available as an ebook; the print edition will ship on June 26th. It’s well worth a buy if you’re curious to know more about the history and evolution of MMORPGs; Koster’s influence on the MMO industry is undeniable, and this book offers a lot of insight into the earliest years — and defining titles — thereof.