MMORPG News - Raph Koster Interview @ RPS

Raph Koster talks to Rock, Paper, Shotgun about the current state of the MMO industry.

RPS: You’ve been saying for a while that you think the games industry isn’t using the web well, and that the influences for new online gaming will have to come from outside the industry. Why do you think that?

Koster: I wish I had a good, sound-bitey answer to that. One of the things is that our influences in the game industry are fairly narrow. Bioshock is one of the big hits of the year, and everyone is impressed by its core narrative influences. It’s a critique of Ayn Rand and Objectivism and all of that stuff. But if you think about it, Objectivism is common currency for game developers, it’s a nerd kind of thing. So we’re not referencing anything too far afield there, a little further afield, but not a lot. A lot of the common cultural currency is not all that diverse, and that was really hammered home for me by watching the Xbox Live trailers for the new year. I sat with my wife and she said that if she hadn’t been told that they were all different games, she would not have been able to tell them apart. They were all so similar.