THE MIND OF A MAKER

Growing up, Koster played a lot of board games, including the then-niche Dungeons and Dragons. He started his first game company around 1982, when he and his friends were just 12 years old.

“We put a copyright symbol on the name of it, thinking that made it official. We actually made a couple of games and sold them to classmates in Ziploc bags,” he recalled. “That was a kind of education in early game design, although I didn’t know it at the time. Then I got a computer and learned how to program.”

Koster has always been adept at learning new things and is disinclined to limit what he takes up. 

He entered Washington with enough Advanced Placement credits to start as a sophomore and then kept himself busy with club activities, leadership roles, a job in audiovisuals, and running independent creative writing workshops at the Rose O’Neill Literary House, all while handling a 20- to 22-credit course load each semester. (He graduated in 1992 after just three years.)

There was less time for games, but not none, especially when he worked in the AV department as the film projectionist. 

“That meant working nights and projecting movies, and getting good at video games while you watched the movie for the fourth time,” he said. “We had one Mac that we could play Crystal Quest on—as long as you didn’t forget the movie reel.” 

Koster’s work as an English major and at the Lit House honed skills that became very relevant for his favorite part of game design, the “front end” parts—writing, inventing, and getting it to a point where it can be refined and polished. 

For Koster, the two most important ways humans learn are through games and stories. 

“Games and stories teach different things. Stories are great for empathy, understanding character. Games are great at teaching intuition, how things work. They are the scientific method made fun—they teach you to experiment and poke and prod at things and deduce what is going on in order to accomplish goals,” Koster said. “The ability to have fun is probably as evolutionarily important as our thumbs. An enormous amount of how we function in societies and civilizations is because we learn how to work, tolerate, interact with others through childhood games.” 

THEORY OF GAME DESIGN

For Koster, making a game comes one of two ways. He either starts with a formal system of game rules in mind, or he has an experience he wants to convey. 

“I probably made half a dozen different games and game prototypes because I wanted to convey the sensation of a kaleidoscope,” Koster said. “That’s an experience idea.”

One system idea he had was for a game with pieces of varying sizes, making it so certain ones would not fit together, and what it meant to leave those gaps in the landscape. The idea evolved into a game about urban design that rewarded players for building dynamic, mixed neighborhoods. 

“The thing I always say is you can start at either end of that—a formal system or an experience—but they have to meet in the middle, they have to resonate with one another, and getting them to mutually reinforce one another is really where the magic happens.” 

In 2013, Koster published A Theory of Fun for Game Design, “which is probably one of the top three books for people who want to get into making games,” he said. It explores what games are (and aren’t) and why they matter, illustrating some of the principles driving games that casual players may not notice. 

Among the aspects fundamental to good games that Koster said he is always trying to balance are ambition and constraint.

“I do always think there’s a sweet spot between chasing intricacy but still having things be accessible, and for me, that’s really important, to try to land there as a creative,” Koster said. “Sometimes, if I don’t have any constraints, I give them to myself. I don’t like working without a box. I’m a believer that constraint is what breeds creativity.” 

THE NOVEL VIDEO GAME

After graduating from Alabama, the Kosters moved to Austin, Texas where they joined Menton and Delashmit at the company Origin Systems to work on what would become one of the very first MMO games. That was seven days before Koster turned 25. 

“These games changed the entire Internet, completely, top to bottom,” Koster said.

While they drove from Alabama to Texas, the Kosters mapped out parts of Ultima Online, an MMO where characters can live and exist, crafting equipment, building a home, exploring, and more. 

“When we started designing Ultima Online, we were taking the knowledge Kirsten had from her economics courses about supply chains and things like that, and we invented the crafting system that is in all the video games now,” Koster said. “I still have the notebooks. You could wander out and chop down a tree, and we had the abstract property of wood that existed on the tree, then we could make generic recipes that use wood. We invented that whole way of approaching world simulations.” 

During this time, Koster was a part of a mailing list called MUD-Dev, which ended up shaping how people talk about games, even now, 30 years later. Koster recalls threads where people coined terms like avatar, nerf, PvP (player versus player), and many other now-standard terms, including “sandbox games.” 

“That one’s virtually my fault. I wrote a post going, ‘well, this game is more like a theme park, and that one’s more like a sandbox,’” Koster said. The mailing list, whose members spanned the globe, “had a huge impact on what at the time was a very small community of people that were developing online games.”

That impact has ranged from terminology to software mechanics (Ultima Online included a reputation system, allowing players to give other players rankings) to the process for general social interaction on the internet, which in turn generated new jobs (games hadn’t needed a community manager because they hadn’t needed to be maintained). While many of these techniques were initially developed by game designers, social media platforms have since adopted them for their own purposes. 

At the time Ultima Online was being developed, the work the team—a small group whose ages averaged under 25, with folks as young as 17—was doing was novel. Koster was the lead designer on the project, in charge of defining the play experience and helping maintain the game after it shipped.

“We were intentionally doing something very different from what the text games had done, more of a parallel universe, so to speak,” Koster said. “This was a huge shift at the time. Back then you shipped the game, and then you forgot about it, and you went and made the next one. The idea of shipping a game and then having to maintain, update, and run it was novel, and nobody knew how to do it.” 

Koster said they had almost spent their whole budget when they got the game to a testable place. To get it tested by users, they set up a web page describing the game and said that for $5, they’d send the game on a CD. 

The game was estimated to have a lifetime sale—meaning the total number of copies sold—of 30,000 copies. Their test offer was taken by 50,000 people.

“These numbers are small now, but I remember when we realized the in-game money had a better exchange rate than the Italian lira, and we had a higher population than the city of San Antonio. We were a government. It was a shocking realization,” Koster said. When the game finally launched in 1997, Koster said the team landed in The New Yorker and Wired. 

The response to Ultima Online led not only to a myriad of awards and broke open a new genre of gaming, but it also set other precedents. 

CREATING NEW SOCIAL NORMS

The new ability MMORPGs gave players to connect with one another and build characters led Koster to consider additional aspects of the gaming community, and he began writing articles about it, calling on the community to work through the ethical and emotional implications with him. 

In collaboration with Kristen and others from the game design world, Koster developed a theory of rights for players and avatars in 2000 that has since been included in dozens of law textbooks.

A few years later, Koster wrote about the real grief players felt when they learned of the death of another player, and he wrote again when the death was uncovered as a hoax, concluding that “the bonds we form with others online are real. Realer, it seems, than the people themselves, sometimes.” 

With games having real emotional or psychological impacts on players, Koster has been prolific in teasing out what games mean and how they require players, game developers, and companies to act as a result. 

“In the end, the social bonds of the people in a virtual environment make it more than just a game. They make it Real,” he wrote. “When we make a friend, hurt someone’s feelings, suffer a loss, or accomplish something in an online world, it’s real.”

THE NEXT BIG THING

After Ultima Online, Koster was hired by Sony, where he directed Star Wars Galaxies, the first major branded intellectual property MMORPG. 

By 32, Koster was an executive at Sony Online, learning a lot about the overall game business—corporate-level public relations, giving talks about the future of the internet to pump up the value of the company, networking with Silicon Valley, and more. At that time, he headed up speculative research and development, allowing him to invest in emerging technology. 

Koster left Sony to continue to pursue web gaming, something he did not feel the company was paying attention to. He began his first startup, Metaplace, Inc. 

“I decided to try building something I’ve been dreaming of ever since the early days, which was a virtual world, called Metaplace,” Koster said. The game allowed anyone to sign up and build a virtual world where people could visit. “All of the worlds were connected into a network, so you could move from one world to another seamlessly with one identity.” 

The only problem? It wasn’t profitable. While the game ended up folding, the company used the technology to make Facebook games for about three months before it was acquired by a company that was in the process of being acquired by Disney. 

“I got acquired twice in the space of a month and landed as a vice president of the Disney Corporation,” Koster said. While there, the technology he created was used to put the game Club Penguin on mobile devices. 

When Koster left Disney, he won the Online Game Legend Award in 2012, which is essentially a lifetime achievement award, voted on by fellow developers. He was 40 years old, and he was, by his own admission, “really burned out.”

He pivoted into a consulting position, where he worked on Android operating systems’ keyboard functionality, with Google on a cloud-based augmented reality that allowed people to view the same augmented reality through their phones, and with Facebook and game companies on new games, including creating bar trivia for Buffalo Wild Wings.

Eventually, Koster decided it was time to start a new studio. “I got the itch. I found myself giving my best ideas to my consulting clients, which was something I swore I would never do.” 

STILL REACHING FOR THE STARS

In 2018, Koster and a business partner started Playable Worlds, a game studio that develops immersive online worlds. Koster is the CEO and runs the studio and community management side, while his partner spends time on corporate development. Koster’s duties include not only answering questions on the social media platform Reddit and being available on Discord, a chatroom app, he also coded the first technical prototypes for the projects they’re working on, files patents, and more. 

Playable Worlds is a venture-backed company that, to date, has raised over $40 million to create games. They have turned to Kickstarter to “kick finish” their new game, Stars Reach, raising another $800,000 and enlisting thousands of new playtesters. 

“Competitor products have budgets closer to half a billion dollars,” Koster said. “So we are small, scrappy, independent, working with players moment-to-moment.” 

Not too shabby for a self-taught programmer who, today, holds several patents. 

Because of Koster’s game-making, he doesn’t do too much gameplaying anymore. 

“The more you work in it and the more you push your own skillset, the vast majority of what you encounter starts feeling like ‘I’ve seen this before.’ You end up looking for novelty. So what it boiled down to is I hardly ever play games for pleasure. I often say my favorite game is making games.”