Raph Koster

One of the old Stratics crew here, I used to run the Ideas Den back in the day ;) And my housemate is still involved with Stratics, although not UO these days. Both of us are old Europa players, and used to have a house near the Fyde's and Barian! And the housemate was involved in the Trinsic RP scene. Feel free to drop me a line if you remember us ;)

In a strange way, the community that formed around Ultima Online saved my life in more ways than one.

As a hacker, there's a lot we can learn from UO's ups and downs, and especially how much emergent gameplay appeared, and how the developers reacted. Clean Up Britannia being a great case in point, along with Trammel.

And from a pure tech point of view... what the hell was with the low latency of the old 2D client? For some reason it always offered a better connection than any of the multiple attempts to re-write it. That in turn resulted in the community sticking to said 2D client, and the developers cancelling the first '3D' client (still fixed isometric, just 3D rendered). What's fascinating is some of the directions it didn't go in - back before the Kingdom Reborn client was developed, there apparently was a Warcraft 3 style engine under development.

When it comes to game design, Raph Koster is one of the people who literally wrote the (a) book on the subject, having started out in MUDs and then being hired for UO. His blog is extremely worth reading, and if you have any interest into the history of UO's game design,…

If there's a bull case on FB to me it starts with the release of this Facebook Spaces beta.

Spaces - or something like it - along with an eventual great set of AR glasses or contact lenses - is the end game.

There's no question the long goal for corporate AR is to digitize the entire physical world, catalog it, and then sell outrageously effective ad inventory / flair against everything that we see.

Using a fairly controlled VR environment as the beta case for this to get us all hooked is a huge step in the right direction and they already own the entire social graph to execute in this direction.

I don't know whether I should be excited or terrified that it's FB leading this effort.

They have the scale to execute, they have the technology to support the crucial relationships but they are SO FUCKING INVASIVE into our lives as a company.

Raph Koster's lecture at GDC got some fairly broad attention on this concept, although his was geared more to the potential negative consequences, but it's still 100% worth a watch for anybody interested in the space.

https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/03/05/slides-for-still-logged-in-my-gdc-talk/

The people currently trying to track everything you do online would really love a future where they can also track all your offline physical activity and map "inside of buildings and homes and all the objects inside of them".

Raph Koster predicted[1] this years ago. I hope anybody implementing this type of tech remembers that all tech is dual use. To understand the full impact of a proposed technology, Raph Koster advised[2], "Every feature must be looked at as a weapon." Promising that "...any faces and license plates captured by Aria glasses wearers will be anonymized." doesn't even begin to address the ways this technology could be used maliciously.

[1] https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/06/11/how-to-build-the-scary-future-today/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgw8RLHv1j4

One problem with digital databases: What if the electricity goes out for a very long time? Or a nefarious hacker manages to destroy the database? (Or all librarians' terminals are locked by NotPetya...)

Library without catalog is, while not totally worthless, much more difficult to use.

The physical card catalog, like other paper-based archives, is more resistant to attacks. For it to be destroyed, you need to cause physical damage, like a giant flood or tornado or hit it with explosives.

See: https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-threat/

I hope that at least the national libraries and archives will maintain physical backups for the worst-case scenarios.

Raph Koster did a presentation at GDC2007 that touched on this: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdcprime2007.shtml

The slides that struck me were this one:
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdcprime2007/Slide61.JPG
followed by this one:
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdcprime2007/Slide62.JPG

Note that even back then Habbo had more active monthly users than WoW.

Of course Habbo and Runescape are free to play (at the basic level at least), but the costs of running them are so much smaller. Last I heard, Blizzard's WoW team numbered close to 1000 full-time staff. Jagex has a very small team that has only very recently started to expand.

Wikipedia 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 through the video game industry, and may have come into mainstream usage via Flickr, which began as a tool for an unpublished MMO."

Original blog post:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-uo/