Top all-time · #666
Raph Koster
Personal blog · raphkoster.comgamesdesignculture
Raph Koster's personal blog at raphkoster.com covers games, design and culture. Since 2008, 95 different Hacker News readers have linked it 141 times, most often “Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Raph Koster's blog for his firsthand design writing on Ultima Online and other MMOs, and for his essays on game design theory and online worlds. Commenters also cite his postmortems and talks.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- One commenter calls his blog "excellent". Others call a post "nice" and say his Ultima Online writing is "amazing to read", and one says another post might be i
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)10 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2018-02-09
- Random Ultima Online anecdote #2 – Horses inside players (2014)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-04-16
- The cost of games4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-01-18
- A Jedi Saga3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-04-17
- AR is an MMO3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-07-11
- /tag/ultima-online/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-07-21
- The internet as existential threat2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-06-28
- Game design articles2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-03-15
- Online World or Metaverse?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-31
- Did the term 'sharding' start with Ultima Online?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-01-08
What Hacker News says?
Raph Koster, for one. https://www.raphkoster.com/2021/09/02/online-world-or-metave...
Comment linking /2021/09/02/online-world-or-metaverse/
on “The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft”Submitted Game design is simple as a story · 560 points
HN discussionhttps://www.raphkoster.com/2008/07/09/a-game-designers-core-... which leads to https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/01/15/a-vision-exercise/ and its critique counterpart: https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/01/06/how-i-analyze-a-game/ and crucially, the observation in here that you can start with either end -- the experience you want or the systems -- but you gotta make them meet in the middle. These days, game design is gen…
Comment linking /games/presentations/rules-of-the-game-five-further-techniques-from-rather-clever-designers/
on “Game design is simple”Submitted Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009) as a story · 294 points
HN discussionTowards the end of the article I mention "some of us have been working out the rule set for how you can link loops into a larger network of problems for literally over twenty years." That is referencing the "game grammar" effort undertaken by myself, Dan Cook, Stephane Bura, Joris Dormans, and many others. It is very specifically about arriving at a notation system for gameplay logic. The original talk from 2005 is…
Comment linking /games/presentations/a-grammar-of-gameplay/
on “Game design is simple”Submitted Random Ultima Online anecdote #2 – Horses inside players (2014) as a story · 205 points
HN discussionNo, I added all the images after writing the article. But the images ARE from the many many presentations I have given on game design, which can be found here: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/ Many of the links are to those presentations, and many of them are deep dives on single sentences in the article.
Comment linking /games/presentations/
on “Game design is simple”Submitted Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009) as a story · 168 points
HN discussionMost classic games are in fact built out of NP problems, or at least the upper reaches of PSPACE. https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/games-are-mat... has an overview.
Comment linking /games/presentations/games-are-math-10-core-mechanics-that-drive-compelling-gameplay/
on “Game design is simple”Submitted The internet as existential threat as a story · 152 points
HN discussionNo, it's not a very local definition at all, it's actually a generalized definition for all forms of game and entertainment -- and art, even! You seem to be assuming I have a reductive definition of game, when the definition given in the article is basically "anything people choose to play." See https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/04/16/playing-with-game/ which is linked in there. I strongly disagree with lumping "intel…
Comment linking /2013/04/16/playing-with-game/
on “Game design is simple”Submitted The cost of games as a story · 137 points
HN discussion1. As the article says, "People will be willing to go along with pretty simple and pretty familiar problems as long as the feedback is great." 2. For arbitrary n x m boards, Candy Crush (and Bejeweled, it's predecessor), has been shown to be NP-complete. That means as a general class of problem, it's officially hard. This is why I said that "A lot of very good problems seem stupidly simple, but have depths to them."…
Comment linking /games/presentations/games-are-math-10-core-mechanics-that-drive-compelling-gameplay/
on “Game design is simple”Submitted Ten Years of World of Warcraft as a story · 128 points
HN discussionThey're not stupid -- they're feedback. You get them as a reward for having done something, usually. But they are also not gameplay, obviously. https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/20/narrative-is-not-a-gam... https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/26/narrative-isnt-usually... ...and maybe https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/03/13/why-are-qtes-so-popula... since you dislike QTE's. :)
Comment linking /2013/03/13/why-are-qtes-so-popular/
on “Game design is simple”Submitted The Financial Future of Game Developers as a story · 111 points
HN discussionYou might like this article: https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/20/narrative-is-not-a-gam...
Comment linking /2012/01/20/narrative-is-not-a-game-mechanic/
on “Game design is simple”Submitted How Ultima Online rares were born as a story · 97 points
HN discussion> crazy juicy, so that players are captivated by spectacle, well beyond the needs of feedback from a UX perspective What a great phrase to describe an aspect of game design to strive for. https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/06/29/game-design-ux-design/
Comment linking /2015/06/29/game-design-ux-design/
on “Game design is simple”Submitted Looking Back at a Pandemic Simulator as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI remember when Raph was working on Metaplace[1], which was a kid-targeting, programmable (Lua dialect), virtual world/user generated content factory that was contemporary to the launch of Roblox ca. 2006-2007. I wonder quite often what things might be like if Metaplace had gotten to the scale and scope that Roblox wound up achieving. 1: https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/09/18/metaplace/ , or this demo https://www.you…
Comment linking /2007/09/18/metaplace/
on “Game design is simple”Submitted Programming languages for aspiring designers as a story · 8 points
HN discussionWikipedia and Ralph Koster seem to agree. "The word "shard" in a database context may be derived from the 1997 MMORPG Ultima Online, which referred to its game servers and their associated databases as "shards." This was in reference to the game's fiction, in which the broken shards of the evil wizard Mondain's Gem of Immortality each contained a complete, living copy of the world.[24] This usage spread informally t…
Comment linking /2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-uo/
on “What was the technology stack driving the original Ultima Online servers?”Submitted The cost of games as a story · 7 points
HN discussionRaph Koster had a lot to do with both Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. In some ways he's as influential as Lord British in this space. https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/postmortems/ He has a book called Postmortems where he compiled essays (many found on his web page) about his early days writing MUDs and developing fantasy worlds, including UO and SWG.
Comment linking /games/books/postmortems/
on “Ultima VIII – How to destroy a gaming franchise in one easy step”Submitted Musings on the Oculus Sale as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI’m glad you enjoyed it, though I personally really only contributed shared code - SOE ended up using my UI library from Planetside across all their titles at the time. From where I sat (St Louis, then San Diego), it looked like the SWG team (Austin) worked incredibly hard on the title, and explored ideas that were really groundbreaking for the time. The Star Wars universe is a hard one to make into an MMO - the way…
Comment linking /2015/04/16/a-jedi-saga/
on “EverQuest”Submitted Facebook rebrands the Internet as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttp://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-online/ has a bunch of blog posts from Raph "Designer Dragon" Koster, one of the original designers of UO. It's amazing to read about how "world like" the original game was, especially compared to the direction that EQ/WoW took the genre.
Comment linking /tag/ultima-online/
on “Why Are People Still Playing Ultima Online?”Submitted Did the term 'sharding' start with Ultima Online? as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
