Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach: ‘The Tragedy of the Commons is a lie’

Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster is back with a new dev blog on Stars Reach, and it’s not about game design pillars this time; it’s focused on trying to explain just what the game is about. Koster says he has four questions – a “vision exercise” – to home in on the answer: what is the game about (thematically and mechanically) and how does the player do that (thematically and mechanically).

“This game is about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have,” he says, referring to the game’s lore. “Crucially, this is a lesson that the Old Ones themselves, for all their power, don’t seem to have learned themselves. It’s all fine and dandy to say that this is what we want the game to be about, but that means that what the player can actually do has to line up to these goals. There have to be game systems that offer second chances, game systems that teach us to live in harmony with each other, and game systems that represent the natural world and how we interact with it.” And that mandate demands “the idea of sustainable settlements front and center.”

Mechanically, however, Koster is trying blend basic MMO concepts like personal progression with collective action and barn-raising, “a collective goal that every player can contribute to individually, even while they pursue their own interests,” while still ensuring that players have a huge impact on the game environment – which leads directly to the ability to ruin and revive the planets themselves.

There’s an intriguing bit on the tragedy of the commons in the blog piece that will sound familiar to folks who’ve read Koster’s books.

“We have one special advantage in approaching things this way: The Tragedy of the Commons is a lie,” he says. “The basic premise of the idea was that given human actors and a common resource, some asshole is always going to hog it all for themselves and ruin it for everyone else. And in fact, we have seen plenty of people who hear about our game and assume that griefers will inevitably win out here too, digging up every scrap of the landscape and ruining the planets for everyone else. But… in reality, humans have successfully managed commons for millennia. In fact, a Nobel Prize was awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her thorough refutation of the concept. The only time that the Tragedy of the Commons comes true is when you accept the premise in the first place!”

“All that is needed is for the players to have the tools to collectively manage their space. We as a team definitely need to nail that aspect. And then, yeah, it gets hard, because trying to solve for everyone’s competing needs and desires means a lot of compromising and negotiation and tough choices. Well, in a game, negotiation and tough choices are called gameplay. We as designers need to give you the tools to manage the space and prevent the one griefer from using up your commons. But after that, it’s on you, the players, to figure out how to solve the larger problem of allocating the resources, deciding how much to build up your world at the price of losing your wilderness, and so on.”

The tragedy of the commons refutation Dr. Ostrom won the Nobel for, if you’re wondering, is called shared needs and is backed by volumes of real-world casework for how people can and do interface with commons, so Koster’s not just dreaming here. Still, MMORPG players have about 27 years’ worth of reasons to be nervous.